


Baseball Season

by Apostrophic



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s06e19 The Unnatural, Established Relationship, F/M, Friendship/Love, Ice Cream, Secret Relationship, Sex Is Fun, baseball!, season 6
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-08-31 16:15:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8585272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apostrophic/pseuds/Apostrophic
Summary: “You cheat,” Scully said, so full of affection it was barely a whisper. The words more of an endearment each time she said them. The fact that he cheated the rules of this game— the fact that his brain worked this way— was the reason she loved him. Him and nobody else.

Scully has found more useful things to do with her time. That don’t include Mulder or baseball. Oh wait, yeah they do. The Unnatural, season 6.





	1. First Base

Mulder tugged her hand furtively, ducking them behind the dugout, bumping her into the wall. Scully laughed, the thousandth time in an hour, the sound soft just before he cut it short with his mouth. 

“Mm,” she said, the stolen kiss sweet in the cool night air. 

Crickets chirped in the grass. The crack of the bat and the buzz from the lights still rang in her ears. She tried to analyze the feeling and decided she felt loose, happy. They had smacked at each ball that flew over the plate until they were hitting more than they missed, and then until they were driving more to the outfield than popping up foul. Mulder had shown her the basics, or tried to— she had led him on pretty much outright. A girl didn’t grow up with two Scully brothers and not know her way around a baseball diamond. Her general enthusiasm, though, or lack thereof, had been more or less true. Pickup games in the summer had not been her thing, too hot and dusty, too desultory, too much effort for too little reward. She had not yet honed her patience at that age and found the games boring, same as the ones on TV, Bill and Charlie with their noses pressed to the screen while she had her face in a book, where she could determine the pace of the action based on how quickly she turned the pages. 

Mulder had caught on pretty quick that she knew more than she let on, either that or he had known from the start and was only calling her bluff. She couldn’t remember whether or not she’d ever told him that background— there was so much he knew, it was easy to forget sometimes there were things that he didn’t. 

He had left her at home plate, the bat in her hands suddenly heavier without him. The kid grinned and tipped his cap at Mulder, taking the twenty and running off in the night. Only then did she worry about where the kid came from, was it their job to see him home? Mulder waved it off, saying the kid _was_ home, just around the corner, and started the old story about pickup games on the Vineyard. From dawn until dusk, ten years old and the only place he had to be was home in time for dinner. 

“Mulder?” she’d said. Interrupting him. “Pitch.”

He had a decent arm, once he stopped goofing around, making the windup dramatic then doing a soft underhand toss. He stopped goofing around when she smacked more balls than she missed, and low, in his direction. He stood off the mound, between there and home plate, and threw her straight, steady pitches, only attempting what he called his curve ball a few times, scurfing it into the dirt, out of practice. 

Their voices filled the field, along with their laughter. Mostly his voice and her laughter, though sometimes the other way around. They switched places too, Mulder taking the bat while Scully found out what she had in her arm. Not much, it turned out. The old summers came back to her, her impatience when she had no control on the pitch, one fast and low, the next wild and high. Mulder swung at everything, lunging for it when he had to, even swatting the bat one-handed when her arm grew tired and the balls dropped and rolled, barely reaching the plate. He showed off, switching to his left hand, giving her facts about Mickey Mantle and Buck Leonard and the Homestead Grays. He was retelling the 1956 Triple Crown, mid-sentence when the lights overhead _ka-chunked_ and went out, plunging them into darkness. The ballpark closed at 9. 

“Come on,” he had whispered then, furtive in the darkness as they found each other. He wrapped his hand around hers, running low off the field like they were ducking onlookers, weaving around the fence as their eyes adjusted, and then his detour as they reached the end of the dugout, pressing her back against the cinderblock wall. 

It, like the whole evening, served exactly no purpose. Which, like the whole evening, made it completely wonderful. 

At her car, Mulder kissed her again, their two Bureau-leased Buicks the only vehicles in the lot. It was just as delicious at first— see again: crickets, the cool night air— but then Scully grew uncomfortable, out in the open, casting a glance around, the mood close to spoiled by remembering their every move so rarely went unobserved. 

Mulder, alert to it, popped the locks with his key. They met inside his car, this time like teenagers, flushed and excited by having something to hide. Mulder’s Buick had no console, and within minutes he had her practically in his lap, her head bumping the visor, the gearshift in her back. “Ow,” she said, “Mulder.” Coming up for air. 

He was panting. They both were. And grinning, a slice of his face visible in the moonlight that fell through the windshield. 

“Is that what you had in mind for tonight?” Scully said. 

She tried to sound scolding. She realized her voice, low and hoarse from the kissing, sounded anything but. 

“Mm,” was all he admitted, his fingers in her hair, pulling her face back down. 

Several minutes later, “Mulder,” she said, breaking in again. 

He tipped his head back on the headrest, content and unhurried. “Yes?” he said this time, a rasp in his throat that went straight to her spine. It derailed her script, going further off-book when he circled her ear with his finger, tucking her hair back from her face. She felt fifteen again, silly and too old for her age and up to no good. 

“What?” Mulder said eventually, when she still said nothing. 

“We should get out of here.”

He nodded. “My place?”

But the moment was perfect. They lingered, as in sync now as when they had smacked baseballs back to the fence, their hands overlapping. “I miss this part,” Scully said suddenly. A surprise to her too. 

Mulder said, “Which part is that?”

“This,” she said, her fingers brushing his jaw. The jaw that had caught in her hair as he talked suede coats and conspiracies and her crackpot, brilliant partner. “We skipped this part. The—” She was committed now, so she felt around for the words, no matter how silly. “The slow burn, the first dates. The part where we take it one step at a time.”

He raised his eyebrows. She heard it too, exactly what he was thinking. _Slow burn?! That’s what we skipped, when it took us four years…?_

“You know what I mean.”

He did know what she meant. He took it seriously. “I don’t think we _skipped_ it. Exactly. We just— did it in our own way.”

“Yeah,” she said. Scully slid off his lap, straightening her jacket, twisting the rearview mirror to smooth and tuck her hair. 

“Hey,” he said. “Scully.”

Mulder caught hold of her hand. 

She turned back to face him, tucking one leg up beneath her, leaning into the back of the seat. Mulder was holding her hand like a too-earnest junior about to ask her to prom. The thought almost made her laugh. 

“Let’s do that part. Tonight,” he said. 

That did make her laugh. 

“Which part?”

“This.” He gestured around them. “You. Me. The part where I ask you over because we’ve never done this before.”

She tipped her head forward. “Seriously?”

If he heard the scoff in her tone, he was an expert in ignoring its existence. 

“Seriously,” he said. 

“Why?”

“Why do we do what we do? As humans?” Mulder shrugged. “Because it gives us pleasure.”

“What’s gotten into you, Mulder?”

He grinned. “Baseball.”

Then he laughed at the look she gave him. 

“Just one night,” he said. “Where we see what it’s like if we’d done things this way.” His eyes shone now. He tugged her hand, shrugging one shoulder. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

“Fun,” she repeated. 

“Fun,” he said. Leaning across the seat to bring his face next to hers. 

Scully shut her eyes for a moment, processing the idea and assenting to it, touching his lips with a kiss, her eyes coming open as Mulder added his tongue. 

“Hey,” she told him. “That’s crossing the line.” Her best stern-partner voice. After, of course, she had pushed back with a kiss of her own. 

The grin on his face widened. 

“What time is it? 9?” she said. 

He showed her his watch. 9:30. 

Scully paused at the door, her hand on the handle. “Well,” she said. “I suppose I’m free around 10. If someone were to ask.” She popped the door open just before she stepped out. 

Mulder still leaned across the seat, his elbow propped on the back she ducked back in the door. Scully waited.

He looked up. “I’m just thinking,” he said. “What I would have said to get you back to my place. Nothing sounds right.”

Oddly enough, she knew the feeling. All the lines were trite and too obvious, used up by movies, in scripts for other people. She and Mulder could only be natural; none of the lines worked. 

“That’s why you never said anything,” Scully said. “And I never could figure out what you should have said.”

“What did you want to hear?”

He was looking into her eyes. It played in her head, all the nights just like this one, reluctant to part ways, wanting him to say anything, something. 

“I don’t know,” Scully admitted. “It wouldn’t take much.”

The look on his face at that one. “Don’t go,” Mulder said, trying it out. 

Yes. That would do it. 

Mulder added to it: “Come over.”

The crickets chirped, the damp grass. 

“For the record,” she said, “I think that would have worked.” 

“That’s a yes?”

Scully gave him the smile she had tried to hold back. “Yes,” she said. 

She glimpsed the smile from him too as she pushed the door shut between them, hooking it without slamming it in the quiet night air.  
  


* * *

  
Halfway down King, her phone buzzed. Scully glanced in the mirror. The headlights that had swished behind her as they left the parking lot were no longer there, Mulder’s Buick not behind her. He’d turned left, two lights back. She checked around her for traffic, then stretched for the phone, flipping it open late, on the fourth or fifth ring. 

“Mulder?”

She could tell he had been ready to hang up. 

“Um,” he said. Hopefully focused on the road. “What are you doing tonight?”

Scully paused, not sure she got what he was doing. 

“I—” She hesitated. “Have a date?”

He groaned. Then he chuckled. She frowned, confused. 

“I was trying that out,” Mulder admitted. “That’s how I always pictured it would happen. Over the phone, late. You know.”

Oh. “Oh,” she said. Still not entirely sure that she followed. 

He sighed. “That was my worst nightmare, though. Thanks.”

Scully flicked her blinker, threading through the cars that filled two eastbound lanes, wondering how there could be traffic at this hour. 

“Mulder, I don’t—”

“I know you meant me,” he said. “But that’s what scared me shitless. That one day you’d answer, you’d go, ‘I’m out with someone. I’ve been seeing this guy. I can’t talk.’”

“Mulder,” she said. How was it they got to such stark, honest places so much more quickly over the phone? He was right. It would have happened this way. On the phone, late. 

“You want to guess why,” she said, “I never answered like that?”

A pause.

Scully waited. 

A long pause. 

“Scully,” he said. 

She guessed his next words. “Come over?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That.”  
  


* * *

  
Her face, as she knocked on his door, looked serious, uncertain, and… slightly flushed. Scully had worked hard to compose it, Mulder’s elevator slow as it climbed the four floors. That was the best she could do, two out of three, catching a glimpse of her face just before the doors dinged and slid open. The elevator helped remind her how it used to feel, crawling up the four floors, sometimes zooming up the four floors, getting her there either too fast or too slow depending on what awaited. It used to factor consistently into her fantasies. _Used to?_ It did, still, sometimes, even though fantasy had paled next to reality for quite a while now. 

She frowned. There was no sound from behind Mulder’s door. Scully lifted her hand, rapped again.

His car was out front. It had been there when she pulled on the street because she had taken the long way, King Street to Braddock and then circled around. 10:05. Giving him time to throw clothes in the hamper, tidy the kitchen. They had not been at his place for a week. 

“Mulder?”

She glanced down the hall. Then stepped back as she heard the lock slide. 

“Mulder, I—”

“Scully.” The door swung back so quickly he was all of a sudden there. “Come in.”

She did not finish what she started to say: _Mulder, I feel silly._ He did not look serious. He looked worked up, beaming, taking considerable effort to retain his deadpan expression. He stepped aside, but not all the way, their bodies brushing as she stepped past him. He clicked the door shut, eyes on her as he hesitated, then slid the deadbolt, locking them in for the night. That part normal behavior, not first date pretend behavior. 

And that quelled her first question, at least. Whether they were themselves, or supposed to be someone different. “Would you like a drink?” he asked, gesturing for the kitchen. 

Scully followed him, curious now to see how this went in his head. “Is this how you think it would go, our first date?”

“ _Our_ first date?” Mulder grinned at the cabinet, rummaging through it. “I’m pretty sure I would already have you out of your clothes if we had done it like this. _Normal_ people, Scully. I’m trying to do a normal first date.”

Her hand came up to her neck, rubbing inside the collar of her jacket. She ducked her head, smiling, as he turned to face her. She was aware of the color that was in her face. 

“Although,” he admitted, “you’re not making it easy.” Grinning again: “You want a beer?”

Surprised: “You have beer?”

“In the fridge. Nice and cold.”

Mulder never had beer in the fridge. But then, in this hypothetical scenario, how should she know he never had beer in the fridge? Things she should also not know: that the pretzels were fresh because she bought them last week. And the fridge was otherwise empty because the last three nights he had slept at her place. 

“Sure,” Scully said, “thanks.” He already had the two bottles on the counter, popping their tops with his key. 

“Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she said, lifting the bottle he gave her. He clinked the neck with his own. “Mm,” she said. “Good.” As it slid down her throat. 

He nodded, tipping his bottle back down, taking a big swallow. “You’re good at this.”

“What?”

“The small talk part.”

Mulder chuckled as Scully shot him a look. 

“You’re one to talk.”

“See?” he said. “So good. Come on.” His hand on her back steered her out of the kitchen.  
  


* * *

  
Mulder had changed clothes. Well, he still wore the jeans. The jersey was gone, exchanged for a light sweater he’d pulled over the t-shirt. She could tell, she bet, from the state of his bathroom the quick routine he’d done minutes before her arrival. She bet she could tell just by looking at him. His hair, still tousled, on end, from the ballpark. He’d splashed water on his face, though, and swished the toothbrush around his mouth. She smelled mint from here. He’d taste like mint and beer. Mint, beer and salt, the bowl of pretzels on the table. 

“Scully?”

“Hm?”

She drew her tongue back through her own lips, tasting the salt there in anticipation. 

“You zoned out on me there.”

“What was the question?”

Mulder’s eyes hadn’t stopped shining, though he tried to be serious. He shook his head. “There wasn’t a question.”

Scully lifted the bottle back to her lips and his gaze said the same thing as hers: _Christ._

She agreed. _Christ._ How long were they going to make it?

She leaned forward, setting the beer out of reach. Inebriation, the light buzz she was starting to feel, like the lights in the ballpark but inside her head, was no help at all. She decided to give herself every advantage. 

They sat knee to knee on his sofa. Much like they had faced each other in his car: turned sideways, leaning into the back cushion, Mulder’s arm propped on the back of the couch. First, resting his head on his hand, then dropping his hand down. It rested behind her, by her shoulder. Not touching, but there. The not touching made her more aware it was there. 

Scully decided to kick things into gear. She nodded down at his arm. “What was this, Mulder? Your go-to move in high school?”

It took him a second— it usually did when she was so blunt. He lifted his hand, looked at it, laughed. “This? No. Not even close.”

Scully nodded down at his other arm. “This?”

Her leg had moved, overlapping his. His hand lay across it, thumbing the seam on her slacks just inside her knee. 

“Scully,” he said. “You have no idea how little game I had in high school.”

“I might have some idea,” she said mildly. 

Mulder shook his head. “You don’t. But,” he said, finger upraised, just before that hand left her slacks to reach for his beer. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Scary movies.” He punctuated the air. “Ultimate aphrodisiac.”

“Oh no,” Scully said. 

He laughed. 

“You were one of _those_ boys. No imagination.” 

“ _Some_ imagination,” Mulder protested, sneaking a smile over top of his beer. 

“Mm-hmm. I saw _Poltergeist_ at sixteen, and my date was by no means laboring under the same delusion.”

“See,” he said. “Scully, that right there is why there is no way I would have gotten near you in high school.”

“What, that right there?”

“You were one of those girls.”

Scully sat up, slightly straighter. “ _Those_ girls.”

“No, no.” Mulder swallowed his beer, setting it to the side. “It’s a good thing, believe me. One of those girls who demand more than the minimum effort. No guy at that age is worthy.”

She made a face, a fond, sympathetic one, which had nothing to do with the fact Mulder had lifted her knee fully into his lap, his hand warm on the back of her thigh. 

“I think we would have been friends,” Scully said softly, more out of sympathy than actual conviction. 

Mulder shook his head no. “We wouldn’t. But,” he said. “We’re friends now. So who wins?”

Her hand had wrapped around his elbow, rubbing the sleeve of his sweater. His smile was not the first that night that had gone straight to her spine. 

“C’mere,” he said. Not touching her anywhere but the back of her thigh as he leaned in and kissed her. 

She was not prepared for it yet. It caught her off guard, his lips soft, not demanding. When he pulled back, she leaned forward, prolonging the kiss, deepening it just a little. 

Scully touched the back of her hand to her mouth as they broke apart, slightly abashed at how it affected her, and much more pleased than abashed. Mulder, rarely abashed, very pleased, creaked the leather couch as he sat back and reached for his beer, in that order. 

“College,” she said. Liking how calm her voice was. “What about your move in college?”

He laughed. She liked that too, how much they had laughed the past two hours. It was a nice change. Then he was shaking his head. “Uh-uh. I’m not that easy.”

Mulder creaked the couch again, this time handing over her beer.

“You drink for each question.” 

There was less than a quarter of the beer left in the bottle and Scully tipped it up, no protest, draining with two swallows the last of the beer until the bottle was empty. She handed it back.

Mulder took it, impressed.

“So we know _your_ move in college,” he said.

Uninterested now in this inquiry, she crossed the demarcation line, into his territory, bringing him with her back across the line.

This kiss went deep. His hand on her thigh, pulling her towards him; her hand on his neck, pulling him back. It was the kiss she had wanted moments ago— the one she had wanted since his Fox Mantle message that evening. Fierce, deep, slightly filthy.

“We should do this more often,” Mulder panted when they came up for air, and all Scully did was pull him back in. 

He did taste like mint. And salt and beer, his lips chapped from the cool air and also her mouth, her tongue licking, her teeth biting him. He kissed outside the lines, putting his whole body into it, turning her face to lick and suck down her jaw, bite her neck, then back to her mouth. Always back to her mouth, the next several long minutes getting away from them both. Scully mumbled into his mouth, his name, the word _wait_ — not _stop_ — no, never that. He nodded, his hand lifting the back of her neck, her hips lifting too, pressing up against him. “Mulder.” Quiet this time. “Mulder.” Slightly louder. 

“Mulder.”

They were a tangle on the sofa, the pillows crushed behind her back, her leg, barefoot, hooked over him, his hand making fast, steady progress up the inside of her thigh. 

Scully bumped her forehead to his, holding him there as she caught her breath, a small chuff of a laugh. “This isn’t slow burn,” she told him. “This isn’t one step at a time.”

He laughed out loud, helpless, breathless, rolling his forehead on hers. “No,” Mulder agreed, pulling back one half inch. Did her mouth look as swollen and kissed and hungry as his? She had a magnetic core, she’d learned that long ago, and he was due north, always pulling her to him. 

His hand inched back up her thigh and Scully realized she’d kissed him again. This time she savored it, then put a whole inch between them when she broke it off, playing it safe. She put her hand down on his, pushing it back the same inch. “You don’t get to third base from first,” she whispered to him. 

“Hmh?” Mulder said. Always so eloquent when she addled his brain. 

Scully brushed her lips to his temple, the back of her hand to his jaw. “First date is first base,” she told him. “Not all of the bases.”

He got the look on his face like when he tried to do math. “I’m pretty sure you run all the bases in baseball. That’s when you score.”

She countered, “I’m pretty sure you don’t get to first and run straight to home.” 

She touched her lips to his, this time not a kiss, her mouth stretching into a smile. Mulder chuckled, defeated by logic, easing her with him as he eased upright. 

Then like she weighed nothing, he brought her across his lap to the other side, dropping her down on the pillows propped there. The mirror image of where she just was, at the other end of the couch. Now with the fish tank burbling over her head. Scully lay back, relaxed. Mulder sat over her, the reversed image too, now his right elbow propped on the back cushion, her knees tucked up against him. He didn’t look at the fish tank. He looked down at her. 

She smiled. 

He smiled. 

His left hand touched her belly, sliding up beneath her shirt. 

She brought his left hand from beneath her shirt, placing it in the same spot but on top of her clothes.

He smiled. 

She smiled. 

He acquiesced, his hand moving in slow circles, up to the underwire of her bra and down to the waist of her slacks, bunching then smoothing the fabric, not trying again to venture beneath it. 

“First base, huh?” Mulder said. 

Scully wriggled her toes, tucking them between his legs in search of warmth. She had not known her very early or very late birthday present involved standing in dewy grass in the damp April air. In fact, she rather thought that it wouldn’t include the outdoors much at all, and the thin trouser socks offered her little protection. She had taken them off with her shoes and her coat, better to have nothing on her feet than something cold and damp. She nudged him with her feet now, the signal between them that he should do something about it. 

Mulder shook his head. He held up his hands, helpless. “I think that’s past first base.”

Scully pushed his leg with her toes. “It’s definitely not past first base.”

He looked down. “I don’t know, Agent Scully. I’m seeing bare skin.”

“My face is bare skin. That’s first base. And my hands.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I see your point. The problem, for me, is that your feet fall below this horizontal axis.” He drew a line on her stomach one centimeter above her waistband. “That seems like dangerous territory.”

Scully was staring at him. 

“But,” Mulder said. “Hold on.” She watched, raising up on her elbows as he moved her feet to the couch, about to protest as he got all the way up. He popped his head back out of the bedroom. “You don’t have a crackpot, brilliant partner for nothing,” he promised, and then disappeared. 

Scully dropped back on the pillows, wondering what she had done. She had only been teasing him, the first base thing, giving back as good as she got since he spent an hour innocently feeling her up on home plate. It was fun to drive him a little bit crazy. The problem, so far, seemed to be that he was not driven crazy, at least not very much. He seemed to like the challenge. While the idea, now, if he kept it up, would drive her all the way crazy. She tipped her head back, trying to see if the fish offered sympathy. One swam in lazy circles, bumping against the glass. 

“A-ha,” Mulder said, dropping back on the couch. Definitely far to her side of the middle cushion, one whole half of the couch empty. It gave her hope. He showed her what he held. That part was definitely all right by her too, a pair of thick wool socks that he pulled apart with his teeth. He shook them out, then bunched each one open, tugging them down on her feet, first the right, then the left. 

“Better?” he asked. 

So much better. 

“Allowed?” he asked. Rubbing one foot with both hands, the other one tucked back between his legs. 

“Allowed,” she said. He smoothed the sock all the way down her ankle, lifting her foot to his face to get a mouthful of wool, biting her arch. She giggled, toes curled. 

“So what are the rules?” Mulder asked her sincerely. 

“Hmm?” Scully opened her eyes. They had drifted closed, her face going lax as she let him have his way with her feet. He had moved to the right one, the left one now tucked in the couch by his waist. She knew she sounded surprised. “You mean, really do this?”

He sounded surprised. “You don’t want to?”

“Mulder, I—” Scully laughed softly, which also included a sigh. Mm, he knew how to give a foot rub, digging his thumbs in the sole, finding her pressure points, not holding back because it might hurt. She gave him a fond smile, which had everything to do with how pliant she felt, melting into the couch. “I was just teasing about that,” she said. “Playing around.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “I was too.” He was serious, though, thoughtful, and Scully frowned slightly, waiting for him to go on. “But you weren’t teasing about _that_ part. Were you, the part where we did things all out of order and you felt you missed out?”

Her hair caught on the pillow as she shook her head back and forth. “Mulder, I didn’t miss out.”

“Okay, bad choice of words.” Mulder gave her a smile, grateful. “But still. Don’t you want to try it? The normal progression of things?”

“So,” she said. “What I hear you saying: you _don’t_ want to have sex tonight.”

Scully loved when she made him laugh out loud with her bluntness, especially when it sounded like she’d kicked air out of his lungs. 

“I’m not saying _that_.” Mulder paused. “It sounds like crap when you put it that way.”

“Okay, so sex is within the rules.”

This time he chuckled, showing her the different shades of his laughter. He didn’t answer that, not for a moment. Finally, he said, “How about,” gesturing with his hand. But that meant he let go of her foot, and she made a sound of protest. “How about, we stick to the theme of the evening,” he said, finishing the gesture quickly, his hand back on her foot. “The bases.”

“Baseball?”

“Like you said, you don’t run from first base straight home. So we round the bases.”

“As in…” 

He was nodding. 

“Hmm.” Scully felt she could warm up to that idea. There was one logistical issue. “What are you thinking, one base an hour? It’s already past 10. One base every ten minutes?”

Mulder tweaked her toes. _Who’s impatient now?_ “I’m trying to keep us respectable, Scully. I don’t know. One base a day?”

“A day?”

Scully felt her stomach drop out. Which was a strange sensation, lying on her back. 

Now Mulder looked green. “What, one base a week?” 

Scully was shaking her head. “Mulder, you’d never make it a week,” satisfied at least that that wouldn’t happen. Days sounded bad enough to her right now. 

“Okay then, days,” he said. “Four bases, four days. What’s today, Saturday? So Sunday is second base.”

“We go to work Monday.”

He shook his head. “You go to Quantico Monday.”

“Oh,” Scully said. Right. “And then you have court…” She remembered now why she was dreading this week. She hadn’t protested all that much about going into the office on Saturday, to get a head start so next week would be less of a headache— at least, she hadn’t protested until the cold, dreary winter had picked that day to turn spring, the trees pink, the air balmy, warm sunlight shafting in every window. 

Mulder looked none too excited about it either, the prospect of the coming week being more of the same, the two of them stuck with separate obligations. “So this makes it fun,” he said, presenting his case. “A way to distract us. Extra incentive.”

“That’s very professional.”

He grinned. “That’s me, Scully. Professional.”

She sighed. He went in for the kill, the closing argument. Her foot hooked on his shoulder, he leaned all the way in, holding his face above hers. “If this life’s all we’ve got, Scully, we might as well live it.”

The words surprised her, the softness in his voice suddenly twisting her heart. The couch creaked, the fish burbled. She touched the side of his face and drew him in.  
  


* * *

  
“No,” she said. 

“Yes,” he said. 

They’re debating. 

He’s on the couch, this time sitting upright. On the middle cushion. One throw pillow was half off the arm rest, the others had ended up on the floor. Scully sat above him, slumped against him, kissing and licking and biting his neck, down his clavicle, as far as the neck of his t-shirt would allow. Mulder had pulled off the sweater, an impatient moment of tugging it over his head, his t-shirt coming up with it, her hands pushing the t-shirt up further until he was grunting, pulling it back down his stomach, tossing only the sweater to the floor. 

That was their debate at the moment. Whether what they were doing counted as sex. 

“Yes,” he said. 

“No,” she said, strategically shifting her hips forward a fraction to bump his erection. He sucked sir through his teeth, laughing and grunting at once, the response she kept going for. The closer she could push him to the edge, the better their chances of falling off it. 

But Mulder, somehow coherent against this frontal assault, kept impossibly, improbably, enforcing the lines. They were still fully clothed. Any skin to skin contact besides their hands and face was purely incidental, her shirt riding up her stomach as she moved against him, his shirt bunched up too. Or his hands, on her back, clutching her closer to him and slipping accidentally against the skin at her waist. It was maddening. It was delicious. It had her determined to call his bluff, negate his whole proposition that they could keep their hands off each other. 

“Scully. Scully,” he’d mumble, into her mouth when he needed air. She’d let him try to compose himself for a moment, sitting back, but never going completely still against him, watching his chest rise and fall as he drew deep breaths, dragging her hands down his shirt or his jeans until he was pulling her back to crush her against him. 

“This,” Mulder gasped now, “is not first base.”

Scully nodded. It was, her face pressed in his neck. It sure wasn’t second. It was definitely not third. Not with all these layers of clothing, her clit throbbing for contact, his erection a bulge in his jeans that only intermittently nudged her, taken away every time she sought friction. 

He withdrew again now, jerking back like she’d scalded him, and she pled with him, _C’mon, Mulder. Please._

But he said the same thing, hands on both sides of her face, dragging and biting her lip in spite of himself at the same time he was pulling away. Something in his voice, an edge to it that was no longer so playful, made her disengage. Scully sat back, this time not rocking her hips against him, not dragging her hands down his shirt as he tried catching his breath. 

He looked in physical pain. Even after he dropped his head back and laughed, breathless, incredulous, at this self-inflicted predicament. “I can’t believe,” Mulder said, licked his lips and breathed deep. Tried again. “I can’t believe—”

“You keep stopping me?” Scully finished for him. 

He nodded. He laughed. “Something like that.”

She had a solution to that. “We don’t have to keep stopping.”

Mulder opened his eyes. Shaking his head, this time in disbelief at her, his grin splitting his face. He looked slightly awed. A contradictory mix: longing, content, awed, that made warmth spread in her belly. “You have no idea,” he finally whispered, “how much I used to think about this.”

He’d told her that before. She never tired of hearing it. His hands had gone to her waist, innocently holding her there. Her hands went there too, holding his. 

“Some idea,” she said, matching his whisper. 

“I mean, exactly this.” Mulder licked his lips again, his breath almost caught. Now that she was still, she became aware of the details. His fingers curled around hers. The slight twitch in his thighs as he tried not to move, warm and solid beneath her. It filled her up too, with longing but also with sympathy. Scully sensed something important, something she wanted to know. 

“Tell me,” she said. 

She eased off him, to the sofa beside him, giving him the space to recover if that’s what he needed. She left her leg hooked over his, their fingers threaded together, hands resting on his stomach. Mulder’s other arm slid around her back, not willing either to let her all the way go.

He turned his head on the back of the sofa. She laid her head there, on the crook of her elbow, a couple inches away. 

“It’s funny,” he said. “In my head, a lot of times it was the opposite. You protesting, saying no we can’t, no we shouldn’t, and I— there was no way I could stop.”

A shadow, in and out of his eyes. Like she might judge him for that. Even after all this, judge him. 

Scully bumped her thumb on his knuckles, his hand scraped up and bruised more times than she could count, sometimes broken, until she patched him up, often right here on this couch. 

“For me,” she said, “I’d say fifty-fifty. As to which one of us protested and which one couldn’t stop.”

“You too, huh?”

The couch creaked as she scooted up an inch, his eyes on her, smiling. Slightly above him now, she smoothed his hair back from his forehead. 

“More than I can count,” Scully said. 

Mulder returned her kiss, light, chaste, a peck on the lips. “The one where,” he said, “we’re working late? Here. You leave. I sit back, just like this, tired. Eyes closed. I don’t hear the door when it opens again.”

She said, “That’s without even trying.”

It made him smile, not that he had stopped smiling for the past hour. “The one where,” he said. “You’re angry. You’re so angry with me, and I’m so angry with you I could punch a hole through the wall. Instead, I bend you over the back of this couch, fuck you until you come. Twice.”

“Which doesn’t take long.” He was trying to shock her. He’d have to try a lot harder than that. “Again, without even trying.”

Mulder’s eyebrows lifted. 

“How about,” Scully said, “the nights I’d come by. Stand right at your door, ready to knock, but I’d stop. I could hear it.” Her voice had gone soft. She leaned down to his ear. Not forcing anything sultry, she simply breathed, audibly, approximating the gentle moan of the TV muffled through the door. “The next thing I’d know, I’d be standing right there.” The end of the couch. “Taking off my clothes.”

Mulder was staring at her. She traced the edge of his face. His voice strained as he said, “You thought about that?”

“More than you know.” 

The glow from his fish tank made half his face blue. The light from the kitchen made the rest of it yellow. 

“Right here,” she went on. “For so long before it was finally real.” That last part was nothing she hadn’t told him already, so she added, a smile, “And about a thousand more things on this couch. I think, more fantasies featured here than probably even your desk.”

“Tell me,” Mulder said, and they laughed at how hoarse his voice was. 

Scully shook her head. Blushed in spite of herself. “Most are so… I can’t go on record. And some are so innocent… it just makes me sad.”

“Like what? Tell me that.”

It was entirely possible she’d never get used to his eyes on hers. Scully considered the likelihood, given the years that had passed. He pulled her closer, hand on the back of her thigh, once again easing her into his lap. She kissed him first, her hand holding his throat, feeling him swallow as she kept the kiss light. 

“It’s raining,” she whispered. She brushed the words on his lips. “I can’t drive home. You’d say, sleep on the couch. But you slept on the couch.”

Mulder raised up, needing more of the kiss. 

“‘So what?’ you’d say.”

His tongue touched hers. Heat flashed down her thighs. 

“And we would. Just lie down.”

Mulder’s arm slid around her, high on her back. He broke off the kiss, watching her for a moment before he lifted her up, laid her down on the couch. 

Flat on her back. “Like this?” he said. 

Not quite, but she nodded. 

He eased down beside her, against the back cushions. Stretching out on his side, he tucked her against him, holding her waist to keep her away from the edge. 

“Like this?” he said. 

Scully showed him. Turning ever so slightly away as she brought his head to her shoulder, her arm holding his, their legs tangled together. 

“Like this,” she said. 

“Scully,” he whispered. She closed her eyes. His arm tightened around her. She could feel his heartbeat, pressed into her scapula. He was careful just to lie there, holding her, the rise and fall of their chests. 

Then his breath in her ear. “All night, like this?”

Scully smiled at the way he feigned such hopeful innocence. She shifted in his arms, just enough to lie flat on her back again, her body ever so slightly tucked beneath him, his weight ever so slightly pinning her to the couch. Mulder lay there looking at her, her head turned on the pillow to face him. A long moment before the edge of his hand traced the side of her face. 

His eyes did the same, searching her whole face. He drew a line with his forefinger, her forehead down over her nose, then her lips and her chin. “For the record,” he whispered, “I would have done this.”

His hand flat on her neck so she felt her pulse throb beneath it, his thumb lifting her jaw. 

“And I would have done this.”

A kiss, one that was only light and sweet for a moment. 

“And you would have done this.”

Her legs fell slightly open as his knee slid between them. 

“Mulder,” she whispered, and then there was no more debate about what they were doing, whether it was sex or whether it wasn’t.  
  


* * *

  
It was his voice as much as his body that built the heat up inside her. It had always been his voice first, his words, their conversations— along with their glances and gazes and only the smallest of touches, the way they loved each other for years before they ever laid hands on each other. Sex with Mulder was mental as much as physical, there in the restraint that they practiced before they let themselves go, there in the rules that they honored before it came time to break them. 

So yes, it was his hands dragging over her through the loose shirt, and it was the way his shirt tugged and pulled over his skin, and it was the way they fit together like the couch had been made to hold their two bodies, but when Scully wound up on top of him, and Mulder lifted her hips so that the ache beneath the seam of her slacks met the hard jut of his hips in his jeans, and she began telling him, in snatches of breathless words, why she could not stop doing this, not tonight or not ever, that he was making her come, it was because he was already telling her he loved her like this, he could do this forever, she had no idea what she did to him. He’d been telling her all along. 

“Scully, come just like this,” he finally breathed in her ear.

Of all things, she did. She gripped the back of his neck and made a fist of his shirt and rocked her body on his, until the tension that had built up for hours broke open. She gasped out loud. Mulder was grunting his pleasure, clasping the back of her thighs. Their tongues tangled together. And then he was rolling them over, his mouth on her neck and her ear and her jaw, all the pulse points where her heart was pounding, like they had capsized in the open ocean. Except it felt dark and warm and wonderful, the metaphor falling apart.

Mulder was waiting for her, his hand on her abdomen, when she opened her eyes. He’d been face first on her clavicle and then she’d lost track of him, needing only his weight there against her. He was propped on his elbow beside her, his other hand on her forehead. Smiling down like he’d just watched something get born. 

Scully swallowed, licking her lips, checking to see if her voice was still there. It wasn’t, not yet. Mulder demanded nothing from her, not a kiss, not a grin. She laughed instead, silent. An _I-can’t-believe-that-just-happened_ laugh. 

He laughed too, silent. An _I-can-believe-it_ laugh. 

She checked her voice again. “Did that break the rules?”

“I think so. Probably. Yeah.”

He said it just to tease her. And then he said, “No,” so sincerely, so serious, her pulse skipped, uneven. “Scully, I want you to come every which way you possibly can.”

She closed her eyes. He pressed a kiss to the heat of her forehead. 

“In fact,” Mulder said, in between kisses. “Come until you’re exhausted.” He kissed the groan in her throat. “Come so many times you can’t physically come any more.”

He eased her hips down when she pushed up against him. 

“Don’t worry,” he promised when he got his voice back, pinning her hips with his own. He whispered the words on her neck: “We’re going to do that again.”  
  


* * *

  
Scully came again. Twice. There on the couch, before he left her there, nearly an hour later. Mulder was ingenious with his loopholes of the rules. It was way too much fun for him, she could tell, inventing new ways to refuse her when she wanted buttons unbuttoned and clasps tugged apart. She kept guiding his hand, trying to get it on her bare skin, groaning when she failed, laughing when she groaned. The torture was exquisite, his solutions only more so. 

Nothing was off limits from her neck up. He nursed her throat, he sucked her jaw, he made love with his mouth to every part of her ear. At length it became his ultimate goal, to see if she came from nothing but this. She wanted to know too, giving herself over. She lost track of time, the room constricting to his breath on her throat, his hand in her hair, his tongue in her ear. 

She almost could, come from just this. The slightest touch between her thighs and she could. 

“Please? Mulder,” she begged him. Barely a whisper. 

He wanted to hear what she wanted. She told him. Instead, his hand went to her waist, a light pressure there as he pushed up her shirt, baring her stomach to the cool air of the room. Touching her only through the shirt. Her whole pelvis ached from the extended arousal, her clit begging for contact as he went back to her ear. She whimpered in dismay, long past laughing at the discomfort, her stomach contracting with each pass of his tongue. She kept talking between breaths, telling him what she wanted, somewhere between asking and begging as he heard every word and didn’t stray from his task. It wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair he could do this to her. 

“You’re so close,” he kept telling her. “You’re so close. Why do you need me to touch you?”

Oh, God. She groaned. Her breasts ached too from lack of direct contact, his shirt catching her shirt, grazing her sensitized skin. Given enough time, she could come from just his mouth on her breasts— that was something they had discovered a while ago. But what he did to her now was beyond even that. 

“Scully,” he said. “Scully.”

His voice was low in her ear. She worked to hear it. 

“If you come for me again,” he told her. “From just this, I’ll do it. I’ll touch you where you want.”

Sound escaped her throat. 

“Focus on my voice.” He talked her through it. How he would pull open her slacks. How even her thighs would be wet. How she would come so hard she might not stop coming. How all it would take was one touch of his finger, sliding inside her. 

She knew what he was doing. It was working. Her pelvis clinched, a shudder passed through her. She was no longer aware of the noises she made. Even a breath of air on her thighs would make her come, or her slacks dragged the right way. Mulder breathed in her ear, the final plea. 

“Come, Scully. God. You’ve got to come because I’ve got to touch you.”

She came. He sucked the hinge of her jaw and she slid an inch down the sofa and her slacks dragged on her thighs and the orgasm exploded. There was no doubt that she came. There was no plateau, no shudder that she could keep to herself. Immediately Mulder fulfilled his promise, giving her vertigo at the sudden loss of his mouth. He sat above her, tugging her slacks open, yanking them an inch down her legs. It was her own hand, though, that he pressed against her swollen clit. She moaned, partly with surprise, feeling her own wetness, the clinch of her own thighs. His big hand only guided her, touching her without touching her. Fulfilling his promise with the barest nod to the rules. 

The previous orgasm had not even subsided before Mulder slid her towards another. The heat of her own hand, the pressure of his. Using her palm to drag wide-open circles, the shared rasp of their breath as his fingers slipped, slick. She was at sea, the tug and pull of the first wave sucking into the second, gathering speed, until the second wave reached its peak and crashed down, taking her under. Scully came, gripping his hand, his fingers entangled with hers, and the shudder that passed through her body passed through him too. 

He was no longer talking, just breathing her name, the words left in her own brain mixed up and nonsensical. Scully washed back out to sea, no telling how many long minutes before she floated to the surface and returned to herself. 

When she did, Mulder was gone. She said his name, a question. He answered, his voice soft and strained, from the kitchen: “I’ll be there, just a minute.”

The water ran in the sink, long enough to fill a glass to the brim. A long enough silence for him to gulp it straight down.

Scully got to her feet, through the doorway and into the bathroom before he returned. She put her hand over her face, blushing to herself before she faced the mirror. It was worse than she thought. Her lips were swollen and chapped, her neck abraded from stubble. A red mark on her collarbone that would bloom into a bruise. Her hair wrecked like she’d survived a hurricane, her clothes twisted and wrinkled. And the look that glowed on her face told her: she had not felt quite like that in a very long time. 

When she emerged, minutes later, Mulder had gone through the apartment, flicking off lights. She found what she wanted in the semi-dark of his room. The clock glowed by the bed, eleven minutes past midnight. She folded her slacks, hung her shirt on the chair, even though it was beyond saving. She started to take off the socks, then thought better of it, the hardwood floors cold to the touch. 

Improbably, Mulder’s eyes went there first when she appeared in the doorway. 

He stood by the fish tank, screwing the cap on the flakes that he fed to the fish. Scully waited, patient, as his gaze traveled up. Up, up. The slouched socks, the bare legs, the hem of the shirt. The baseball jersey. Its deep V at the neck, the top button undone. 

The look in his eyes was exactly what she wanted. “It’s Sunday,” she said. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So of course, this is what I do for a month while the Cubs worked their way through the playoffs. Um, baseball. Right? Scully loves it. So do I.
> 
> Three more chapters— I mean bases— are coming shortly, as soon as I get them edited!


	2. Second Base

“Put this on my tombstone, Scully. I mean it. This is how I want to go.”

They’re joking again. 

In the dark of Mulder’s bedroom, standing at the foot of his bed. Scully was taking him out of his clothes.

“You mean, all this time?” she said. “This was all that it took to do you in?”

One baseball jersey, two bare legs, wool socks. Mulder raked his gaze down her again, then sucked in a breath and looked up at the ceiling. Her hands had slid under his shirt. “You have no idea, Scully.”

She took it over his head, walking around him to lift the shirt off his back, a combination of her stretching, him helping, to reach that height. 

“ _Some_ idea,” she said mildly. 

She had to stop to observe the flex of his back. 

Mulder was shaking his head. 

“Nope. No idea. They’re gonna bring you in Monday. Demand to know what you’ve done with the body.”

Scully laughed. “That’s so sweet,” she said, “you think that’s how it would go. Mulder, they wouldn’t even ask questions. I’d have a commendation waiting. A promotion upstairs. I’ve finally done my job, gotten you out of their hair.”

Mulder loved that one, not even able to pretend that he didn’t. He laughed, a deep, hearty chuckle, which was cut short by a sigh, all the way down to his toes. She was running her hand along his latissimus dorsi. 

“Glad to be of service,” he said. “It’s the least that I owe you.”

“My feelings exactly.”

“C’mere,” he said. 

Scully had hold of his hand. He’d reached back for her, ready for her to complete the circle around him. Mulder drew her around, stopped her in front of him with both hands on her shoulders. Then his hands in her hair, lifting it off her neck. 

“I’d think you’d want to do better than that,” she observed softly, “if you don’t have much time.”

“Remind me again what’s allowed. Do I make it past second base?”

“No,” she said. To see what he’d do. 

He did not seem too bothered. 

“So that’s, what?” he said. “Hands above the waist.”

“You’re the expert on baseball.”

“And mouths,” he said, like he hadn’t heard her. “Mouths above the waist.”

Mulder had to smile then, it worked like hypnotic suggestion. Scully gave him a frown, taking her tongue back from the corner of her mouth. 

“So this is my boundary,” he said. And his hands were beneath the jersey. Resting on the curve of her hips. 

She waited, breathing softly.

He waited, breathing softly.

“Open the jersey,” she asked him, a whisper. Her hand was low on his stomach. Then she moved her hand down and opened his jeans.  
  


* * *

  
They landed back on the bed. Mulder’s hands on her everywhere, no longer able to fight himself for control, or at least no longer much interested in trying. Kissing, breathing, tasting the peaks of her breasts, sucking so hard in places that it could leave marks. 

Scully loved him like this. She’d break rules for this, when he finally grew greedy, needing nothing else in the world but her body against him, rough in a way that was nothing but tenderness. He’d do that sometimes at the end of the day, when they walked in the door. Unable to play the dutiful partner one minute longer. Not even talking sometimes, just breaking mid-kiss to find an available surface. The clink of his belt and her skirt dragged up her thighs and it was all she could do to not come just from him sliding inside her. 

It was Scully who forgot herself now for a moment, her knees gripping him tightly, her hands reaching down to work on the rest of his fly. She had not gotten it all the way open. Mulder groaned, the tables turned. He was brushing his thumb on the pink tip of her breast, then wrapping his palm around it, cupping the soft weight like he’d never held something so perfect. 

It’s what she wanted to do to his cock, currently hard and pressing against her thigh. It’s what stopped her, taking all of her willpower, the open V of his jeans, his jockeys beneath it. He made a sound when she dropped her head back on the bed. Her eyes closed, breathing hard. Holding his waist.

“Mulder?”

He nodded. Grabbing her warm, wool-clad foot, goosing her arch just before he rolled them over, landing her weight on his chest, his back flat on the bed. 

“Yes,” he said. Sprawling there. 

She had not asked him anything yet. 

“Yes to what?”

Mulder pushed himself up, propped on two elbows beneath her. “Yes,” he said, “to whatever you want. I’ll do whatever you say. As long as you say, ‘Mulder, fuck me.’”

Scully: a grin. A wrecked grin from him too, his hair sticking straight up. He was trying to get her to cave first, she saw it now. More gratifying to him if she was the one to tug him out of his jeans, give in to what they wanted. 

She tugged him out of his jeans. All the way down his legs, dropping them to the floor. Mulder fell back, squeezing his eyes shut with two fingers. Breathing out, then back in. 

Scully, when she crawled back up next to him, lifted his hand from his eyes. She folded his fingers with hers. His gaze on her warm, dark, full of affection, glinting like a fever. 

“I’m so sure I’m about to beg, Scully,” he whispered. 

She brushed the hair back off his forehead, nodding. That was all right. It wouldn’t change what she was doing. 

Which was holding onto his gaze as she brought his hand down between them. It was his palm she rolled across the front of his jockeys. 

Mulder: a gruff grunt. 

“Oh God,” he croaked. 

The heat of him through the fabric. And then the fabric was gone, Scully sliding his hand beneath it a second before she managed to get the jockeys pulled down. 

Careful to not touch his skin. She wrapped his fingers with hers, around the base of his cock. Showing him the slow slide she wanted, making him feel every inch, up and down. 

Mulder had to swallow, the knot hard in his throat. He said, not without awe, “You really _are_ trying to kill me.”

Scully kissed his hot forehead.

She said, not without sympathy, “Fair’s fair.”  
  


* * *

  
She was merciful with him. Mulder had gone silent, just little gasps in his throat that matched the rasp of their hands, skin on skin. Slick and moving faster, Scully kissing him through it, the heaviness growing again between her own legs. 

She gave him everything she could think of, no longer any pleasure in torture. Her breasts crushed against him, his arm and his chest. His hand in a fist in the back of her hair, no longer letting go of her mouth. They accidentally brushed her stomach, the backs of their hands, and all she did was slide their grip down, kiss the noises Mulder made when it was not just his knuckles nudging against her skin. 

They finished him just like that. He came against her stomach, more unobtrusive than she expected, simply erupting with cum sliding over their hands. She didn’t let go, helping his hand, the spasms not quite subsiding. More cum spilled on his stomach. She realized her own voice was the one that she heard, telling him with no filter that this was beautiful, he was beautiful, this was what she wanted, had wanted for so long. 

They lolled his cock on his thigh, spent and sticky, Mulder’s arms flung out to his sides as she licked over his chest, the taste of his cum and his sweat and his skin more delicious to her than the beer and the salt and the mint. He was done. She was done. Despite the ache between her legs, she knew what easing that ache would entail and it did not include him inside her. She wanted sleep, just like this, drained and still longing and so close to satisfied, Mulder’s arms wrapped around her, his skin hot and pressed against hers, warm in the morning when the first light appeared pale in the window. 

His hands lifted her head from his chest. He eased her back up his body, bringing her face up to his. “Scully, you’re—” He never found the word, what she was. He left it at that, barely a whisper, and then only his tongue, wordless at the taste of her mouth. It took a lot longer than she thought before they curled up and slept.  
  


* * *

  
_Oh, God,_ was her first thought. 

Scully had tried stretching awake. The sheets on the bed were tangled around her, pulled up to her shoulders. She didn’t even attempt, just yet, to open her eyes.

_Oh, God,_ was her second thought. That time with a small smile. 

The room was bright light. No one grumbled beside her, flopping over on the bed at being disturbed, or reaching for her to stifle the process of stirring awake. She rallied herself, rubbing her eyelids before easing them open. Stretching her back with a wince before easing onto it. 

The peak brightness in Mulder’s apartment was usually around 9:30 AM. This looked about half an hour past that, the sun already drifting over the adjacent building, soon to be reflection and shadows. She couldn’t remember the last time she slept past nine. Scully laid there and tried to remember. She couldn’t. 

The floor creaked. Her eyes had drifted closed again, relaxed in the empty bed. She let the smile tug up the corner of her mouth, anticipating the dip of the mattress. The floor creaked again, closer, then Mulder’s voice: “Morning, sunshine.” Warm like the morning. The mattress dipped. 

“There’s coffee,” he coaxed, and it brought her eyes open for the second time. He sat on the edge of the bed, pajama bottoms, no shirt, socks. She wriggled her toes. The socks from last night were still there, keeping her warm. Her legs were bare, prickly with stubble, and the sheet was the only thing covering her breasts. 

Mulder held a mug, steaming. Scully reached out for it, easing up on the pillows. “Uh, actually,” he said as she took the first sip. “That’s mine, not yours. I didn’t know you were awake.” 

Entirely too many words from him first thing in the morning. The mug was half full and black. She made a face at the strong, acrid taste.

“Milk’s expired,” he said, apologetic. “You’ll have to go commando unless I borrow from the neighbors.”

Still too many words, but slightly more manageable with the hit of caffeine. Scully shook her head, perfectly eager to avoid all his neighbors. Mulder looked relieved. 

As usual, each sip improved her mental processing, her goodwill towards the world. She took long sips with long pauses, finally savoring the strength of the coffee. Mulder returned from the kitchen with a second mug, ostensibly hers, but she had nearly drained his so he sipped from the second one, sharing it with her too when the first one was empty. After half of that one, he got the second smile of the day. 

“Morning,” he told her again. 

“Morning,” she answered, soft and husky. 

Scully tried stretching her shoulder. She winced, then with a more concerted effort she stretched it again, rubbing her neck. 

“How you feeling?” he asked into the coffee. 

Scully flipped through the available options, all of them true, none of them sufficient. “Sore,” she said. Before his mind could go anywhere dirty, she added, “If I’m not mistaken, some crackpot made me play baseball last night.”

Mulder grinned, leaning over to kiss her with the grin. His mind still went somewhere dirty. 

She pulled back first, sparing him the fuzzy taste of her mouth. “Morning breath,” she warned him. 

He held out the coffee again. “Here. Swish.”

She did, and when he kissed her again, he said, “Mm. Coffee.” She laughed in his mouth and then pushed him away. 

“As a person,” he said, leaning to take the mug from her and place it on the nightstand, “who may or may not be acquainted with the crackpot who did such unspeakable things to you last night that left you too sore to move, the least I can do is offer— because there’s no apology— to help you feel better this morning.”

Scully was staring at him, at his tousled hair and his muscled shoulder, still entirely too early for her partner’s bare chest, much less his run-on sentences. Mulder shortened it for her. 

“Roll over,” he said, easing her in that direction.  
  


* * *

  
“Mulder.”

Wary. A warning. 

Scully, stretched out on her stomach, eyed him over her shoulder as he rummaged through the nightstand. She was still drowsy and sore and content to take the morning easy, barely ready for conversation, much less whatever he kept in the drawer by his bed. 

“What is all this crap?” he muttered. Mulder pulled apart crumpled paper, then tossed it aside. “Ah-ha.” 

He showed her. 

Aspercreme. 

The unexpected denouement made her smile into the pillow. He folded and tucked the sheet, very professional, just above her waist. 

“What hurts the most?”

Scully pointed to her shoulder. 

He started there. His hands worked, inch by inch, kneading the soreness out of her back. She sank into the pillows, luxuriating in the relaxation she felt. He massaged her spine, her trapezius, the rhomboids major and minor, her serratus posterior inferior muscle, nothing inferior about it. The Latin swam in her head, his anatomy lesson as thorough as med school. “Mm,” she said. Mulder bent down and kissed her, his hand gently rubbing it in. 

When he finished there, Scully went with him willingly, rolling onto her back as his hands turned her over. He seemed content to just do this for hours, in no particular hurry, no end game in mind. Long, slow minutes passed. She felt the tug and pull of her skin as his hands passed over her. The lines of her body that had started to soften with age. Her waist, her breasts, were not what they were at fifteen. She felt— not self-conscious, not that, but aware. Her body held scars, aches and pains that were more quick to announce themselves and more slow in going away, weaknesses that would only increase with the years. She was no longer perfect, not that she’d ever been. But now, from this vantage, youth seemed a kind of perfection that would never be attainable to her again. 

“I’m getting old,” she said softly, not a complaint, just a note. 

Could you feel someone smile? Scully thought that she could, Mulder somewhere above her, running his hands from her ribs to the underside of her breasts. They talked like that sometimes, mostly teasing each other for aches and pains, or curmudgeon behavior. The humor of something that wasn’t quite true. 

So she said something true. “I’m not fifteen anymore.”

“No,” Mulder said, “you’re most certainly not.” The warmth in his voice, the desire, the affection, brought her eyes open. His hands traced the curves she didn’t have at fifteen, the shape of her hips, the slight swell of her belly. He looked down at her with that gaze where she saw herself through his eyes. Hair splayed on the sheets, her body soft, pale and beautiful. 

That was truth of what she felt with him. She felt, if not young, then new and wondrous. When he made love to her, he did it to every inch of her body, reveling in it, loving her skin and her curves and each imperfection. It was a delight to him, something fascinating about her to fixate upon. She understood it because she felt the same about him, never tired of exploring his body, defensive about everything he perceived as a flaw because that was what made him so utterly _Mulder_. There was no one else like him, his grace and imagination and relentless devotion and his crackpot brain, absurd in every way, fascinating and enchanting to her. 

Either Mulder could read her mind, or they were just that in sync, but he stretched out beside her the same time she wanted him in her arms. Scully wrapped him up tightly, buried her face in his hair, inhaling his scent. It seemed right, to whisper the three words to him she never said often enough, tucking them with his hair over his ear. How she felt about him. How she’d felt for years. 

Mulder stirred, drowsy and happy, burrowing into her arms. “I know,” he said mildly, like he replied most times she told him. Joking: “S’bout time.”  
  


* * *

  
Mulder fell asleep. Right there in her arms, his head on her chest. Scully drifted too, anchored by his weight, but not before she watched him a long time. Her hand cradled his scalp, sliding his hair through her fingers. She touched his face as he slept. The straight line of his nose, that one imperfect bump in it. His strong jaw that went slack when he slept. He was beautiful to her, the same way she was to him. In the lines that were beginning to form, the slight softnesses of his body that weren’t there five years ago. She wondered if this was what it was like to want to grow old with someone. It wasn’t a grand certainty that swept into your life; it accumulated day in and day out, accrued with the years and the experiences you shared, until one day, it was just there, as familiar between you as you both were to each other. 

She fell asleep before she could figure it out: what she wanted now, in what ways it differed from what she had wanted before. When they woke, Mulder was bleary-eyed and rumpled and it was half-past noon. Scully tipped his head back as he rubbed his face awake. He looked sheepish, then eager. 

“Are we still on second base?”

It made her laugh. She stretched out from beneath him, letting him grab her back from the edge of the bed. 

She said, “For eleven more hours and,” she checked the clock, “twenty-two minutes.”

Mulder flopped back on the sheets with a sigh, greatly exaggerated. 

When Scully looked back from the door of the bathroom, he had propped on his elbows, watching her, eyes lifting up from her ass. 

“Pick what we’re doing today,” he told her, and waited. 

She had no idea, but she did have some sense. 

“We better get out of this apartment.”

He agreed.  
  


* * *

  
Scully showered first. When Mulder got out, he walked into the living room dressed in jeans and a towel, the towel draped on his shoulders as he used the corner of it to dry his ear. She sat at his desk, clicking the mouse. 

“I know what I want to do,” Scully told him as he came up behind her. The printer churned and spat out a sheet of paper. 

He frowned, squinting without his glasses. She took the paper in his hands, turning it right side up. 

“Walking map?”

“Cherry blossoms,” she said. 

No reaction. 

“Well?”

“I mean, okay…” Mulder did not sound enthused. “It’s so… _tourist._ ”

“Okay, so we’re tourists.”

Scully knew she did not have to beg. She did not have to flirt with him, entice him with the reward that would await him once they got home, although that did sound like fun. She knew he would do it because it’s what she wanted to do, grumbling for effect like he did at work, not wanting it to be so obvious that she could talk him into anything. She tried not to stare at his chest as he lifted the towel higher to scurf his damp hair.

Mulder caught her. 

“See?” he said. Plaintive, or feigning it. Begging with puppy dog eyes. “Wouldn’t this,” he gestured down, the full length of his body, “be more fun?”

Scully swatted at him, ducking beneath his arm, dodging his grin as he balled up the paper and pitched it at her back. 

“Hey,” she said, turning. 

Mulder dismissed the map with a wave. “That’s going to be wall-to-wall people. I’ve got an idea.”  
  


* * *

  
They found a cafe, ate a late lunch and then strolled a circuitous route through the back streets of Old Town, according to the mental map, or lack thereof, Mulder had in his head. The main contingent of cherry blossom spectators were headed for the river, and beyond that the Tidal Basin, and this kept them off the beaten path. It was charming, the various neighborhoods they passed through, differing from his own, as they wound their way in a general southeast direction. 

Mulder pointed out landmarks and architecture as they walked, gesturing upwards, lecturing her on the history that was at least 95% made up on the spot and the remaining 5% incorrect. Scully corrected him the first two occasions and then gave it up, enjoying the fiction he spun around them. He was in the middle of a tale that involved the fall of the Roman Empire when they heard a tour group approaching. His face grew more serious, his voice grew lower instead of louder as he wove the Middle Ages into the history of a house that was barely a hundred years old. Behind him, Scully saw the faces trying to hide the fact that they listened, edging closer to Mulder and away from the tour guide, exchanging glances and raised eyebrows that did not express disbelief but credulity in Mulder’s every word. After a moment, his hand wrapped around hers and they drifted away, casually resuming their stroll, an anonymous couple in the midst of the city. Behind them, Scully heard the click of a shutter, _snick,_ the quick advance of film, two more cameras joining in with shutter clicks aimed up at some random, unextraordinary house. 

“Mulder,” she said. Leaning against him because he let go of her hand to circle her shoulders, pulling her to him. He chuckled into her hair. “And you’re still convinced,” she said, “of eyewitness testimony when it comes to strange lights in the sky?”

Mulder steered her around a pothole in the sidewalk, tree roots that had buckled the concrete, part of it gone. “People are wonderful, Scully,” he said sincerely, that faith in humanity he carried deep in his gut, down beneath the cynicism that had formed a crust on the surface, and she squeezed his waist, both her arms wrapped around him, showing him how much she needed him to keep that faith alive. 

That set the tone for the day. They wandered, with no set purpose, even the cherry blossoms a forgotten excuse. Mulder tugged her over to look at something, or Scully tugged him on when he lagged. He had on a ballcap. He’d put one on her too, before they left the apartment. That, and sunglasses. _There. We’ll blend in._ They held hands, they bumped shoulders. They split apart to navigate obstacles in their path, a tree or a sightseer conferring over a map, but then they came back together, Mulder’s arm sliding across her back, Scully’s thumb hooked in the loop of his belt. They never did this, not ever. Today, though, somehow it fit. They were not government agents, they did not possess badges or guns. No one looked at them twice. They were any other couple on a Sunday afternoon, weaving their way through the neighborhood streets. 

Scully, by mid-afternoon, was pretty sure they were lost. She had lost track of the turns they made, twisting through a labyrinth toward the heart of some maze. Mulder was unconcerned, and so she was too, even as the houses began to grow farther apart. It was a part of Alexandria she had never seen. She was not quite sure it was still Alexandria. Instead of row houses that filled the whole block, there were lawns, there were huge shade oaks and driveways, there were fences and hedges and parcels of land that measured in acres, not feet. 

“What do you think that one is?” Mulder asked, to their right. He was now asking her about architecture instead of bullshitting his own. 

She looked up at the columns, the late Georgian style. “Hm,” she said. “Early Roman Empire?”

“Pre-conquest or post-conquest?”

“Pre-conquest. Definitely.”

He sighed, stepping her forward out of the path of a couple trying to corral their toddler down the sidewalk. “Ah. Pre-conquest. Like us.”

Scully smacked at his stomach, checking over his shoulder on the couple down the sidewalk. The house had a low fence and Mulder stepped her against it, lifting the brim of her cap to try to steal a quick kiss. She managed to duck him, Mulder not seriously trying to catch her as she slipped from his grasp. Halfway down the block, he still had not caught her, and she stopped, turned around. 

He stood in front of a house, two doors down from the one with the fence. When he didn’t answer his name, she walked back to join him, see what had caught his attention. 

“What is it?” she asked him, serious. He had that look on his face when he saw something she didn’t. She stared up at the house, looking for— what? The house looked normal to her. 

“I like it,” Mulder said. 

That was all he said. Scully turned to frown up at him. He shrugged. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just something about it.”

The house was small, the lot that it sat on smaller than the others on the block. There was no wrought iron or peaked gothic windows, like the other properties that had made Mulder look twice. It was a Craftsman, a porch with low-pitched gables, the roof old but the wood siding fairly recently painted. Ivy grew up the steps. The grass needed to be cut. 

“I like it too,” Scully said, surprised. Had Mulder not stopped, she would not have glanced at it twice. 

That was it. They walked on, Mulder said nothing more about it. On the next block, he said, “Ooh, no, this one,” tugging her to a stop in front of a house that made the Addams Family residence look ready to list on the market. He was back to joking again, bending over to whisper ideas in her ear that had nothing to do with architecture and everything to do with plans he had for them later that night. He flirted, he teased, and she put that small moment aside. It lodged in her heart, not ready for any significance yet, but there nonetheless. She would have to be ready before she examined it. 

They found their way out of that neighborhood. The crack of a bat drew them through a park, leaning against the fence to watch half an inning of softball. “See how he steps into the pitch, then he swings?” Mulder pointed. The kid looked twelve years old. He cracked a high fly ball, the infielder jumping and missing. The crowd erupted, parents pressing against the fence, the pitcher flailing his arms in a gesture that none of the rest of his team seemed to translate. Shouts of _No, no!_ Shouts of _Go, go!_ Two outfielders chased the ball through the grass. The kid running the bases barely touched first, his feet flying. There was a pivot, a wild throw from one of the outfielders, the ball hurled without grace, hanging mid-air as the kid flung himself through the dirt, sliding headfirst into base a split second before the loud _thwap_ of the ball hit the glove. The whistle blew. Safe. 

“See?” Mulder said into her ear, excited. The field surged with excitement, the kid’s team high-fiving and slapping and whooping. Scully wasn’t immune. “That’s how you score a double.” Mulder had to raise his voice over the noise. “You hit the ball far enough,” he said loud in her ear, grinning, “you get all the way home.”  
  


* * *

  
They got all the way home. 

Over an hour later, Scully insisting on a detour once the streets around them grew familiar again. They wove their way through the crowd that had flocked to an open air market, no longer touching each other, the territory too close to home. Scully felt up peaches and apricots and glanced through the shoppers to find Mulder sniffing an orange. They bought everything that looked good, filling a paper sack, and then added a pint of ice cream from the shop on the corner. Mulder left her out in the sunshine a block after that, and came back with a movie and a box of microwave popcorn. He shielded the title from her eyes when she tried to peek, directing her gaze upwards instead. The tree above them dropped soft pink blossoms, and the banality of that moment made her happier than she could explain. 

He kissed her in the elevator. He lifted the cap off her head inside his front door, no longer a fan of the Yankees. He unzipped her windbreaker and lifted her feet off the floor and dropped the paper sack by the bed. The oranges rolled out. 

“We bought ice cream,” Scully told him, flat on her back on the bed. “It’s going to melt.”

“Probably,” Mulder agreed, sinking down to his knees.  
  


* * *

  
He had left his regard for the rules across town. It had rolled somewhere with the oranges. “Mulder,” Scully said. It came out like a squeak. “This definitely counts as third base.”

He had her spread on the edge of the bed, a pillow under his knees. She’d tossed it down to him a minute ago, which— okay, granted. Not much of a protest. 

“Unh-uh,” he said, shaking his head, which helped nothing thanks to where his mouth was. “You still have your pants on.”

One pant leg hung off her foot. Or, it had hung off her foot until she dragged her toes up his spine and it dropped to the floor. 

“No. I don’t.”

“Huh? Oh. Ah well,” Mulder said. 

His finger, which had, until that point, been stroking up and down with his tongue through her white cotton panties, traced the elastic around her leg, lifting it away from her skin. Then he pulled it all the way to one side, his knuckles brushing against her, sliding his tongue along the dent it had left on her skin. Scully grabbed backwards for a handful of covers, her stomach muscles contracting. 

“Definitely,” she said, “ _definitely_ third base.”

Her thighs clutched his head. Mulder laughed, trapped, a breathy shivery rumble against her, tickling her with his stubble. 

“Tell me to stop, then,” he said, easing her thighs apart. With the very tip of his finger, he teased her open, tracing back down and then up again. Scully dug her heels in his back, arching her hips toward his mouth. He pulled back. “Stop?” he asked her.

The sound that she made was not _stop._ It was not a whole word, it was a sound that meant the opposite of stop. His mouth landed mid-laugh on her clit and she jolted an inch up the bed, Mulder chasing after her, dragging the waist of her underwear down as he pulled her back to him.

“Jesus, Scully. Easy,” he coaxed her, the last word muffled and mumbled. He hooked his arm around her leg, stroking his fingers through the patch of coarse hair that was just long enough for him to tug when he wanted. “S’okay. I’ll take it easy.”

Scully groaned. 

He used two fingers. Slow, languid, indulgent. It was why she had jolted a moment ago, he never went right for her clit. He liked coaxing her first, drawing his finger all around her soft folds, watching her start to glisten as she grew wetter and wetter. _Scully,_ he’d say sometimes, impressed. Talking her through it, describing to her every move that he made, every response she had to it, what she must want because he wanted it too. 

Today, he kept drawing his two fingertips up, spreading back the small hood that hid her swollen clit from him. Exposing her to the air and the huff of his breath but then moving away, dragging his fingers down through her wetness the same time as his other hand tugged and then soothed her through the neatly trimmed hair. 

Scully was so sure she could come from just this, given enough time. Mulder’s lack of touch where she wanted was just as insanely arousing as his actual touch. She told him so, all of it, in fragments of sentences. He kissed the muscle that tensed at the juncture of her thigh. He said, “I know, Scully, I know.” He said, “So I guess you don’t want me to do this?”

Her clit slid around on the flat tip of his tongue, the lightest of pressure lifting her hips off the bed. Oh, God. She gasped at the nerve endings that lit up her spine, her brain the heat map of pleasure. Mulder didn’t let up. Now that he had her he cradled her in one hand, his other arm hooked around her. He ate her like she was melting out of a dish. He stroked her clit with his thumb while sliding his tongue inside her. He stroked her clit with his tongue while sliding his thumb inside her. He had her on the edge in two minutes or less, backed off then took her there again, backed off then took her there a third time. 

Scully pleaded with him in frustration. She clutched her hands in his hair, she turned her face into the mattress. She laughed.

“Oh God. Mulder. You’re—”

His arm went vice grip on her, trying his best to keep her anchored down, and therefore in his mouth. 

She gasped out the rest. “You’re so bad at this.” It came out with a groan.

“I’m bad at _what?”_ Mulder raised his head to laugh. 

Scully pushed his head back down. “Oh God. Second dates.”

She came in sharp, jabbing contractions, rocking her hips against him, her hand pressing his hand tight on her groin. Mulder kissed her through it, lapping her up, humming his pleasure which only drew out her orgasm. It took her a whole minute to fall quiet. Catching her breath again, collapsing back on the rumpled covers. His eyes were bright, too bright, too satisfied, when he winced his way up off the floor onto the bed beside her. “Scully,” was all he said, his palm making a cup for her chin as he kissed her mouth with a tongue that tasted like her.

She loved that taste. Somewhere between erotic and all too familiar, an intimacy shared between them that seemed a matter of course. “Am I so bad at this now?” he murmured against her, sliding his tongue along hers the same time as his hand slid up her back. Scully rolled with him, on top of him. Both of his hands dragged through her hair as she found a way to fit her hand down between them.

Mulder grunted.

“Third base,” she said. Shushed him. Unhooking his pants.

But he grabbed at her fingers. “Uh-uh,” he said, twisting her hand away, drawing it out from between them. “Third base is at midnight.” 

“Third base is right now.” Scully got his zipper down before he grabbed her hand again. Thus restricted, she angled her hip to direct his attention toward his erection, which he was currently involuntarily grinding against her through his jeans. “You just said so.”

“I said no such thing.” Mulder tipped his head back toward the ceiling, leaning around her. “Hey. Play back the transcript?”

It was one of their jokes, one of her least favorite jokes, that at any given time they were being bugged from above. She ranged from not caring at all to caring a great deal, the joke not that far-fetched. Today, it temporarily subdued her. Long enough for Mulder to fit an ankle behind her knee and flip her over. It was an easy pin, his hands holding her wrists up over her head.

It got her attention back on him. His full height and weight on her, his body long, loose, and heavy. 

“How is that fair?” Scully asked him. “It’s third base for you, but not me?” She frowned slightly, untangling the grammar of that one. “Or— for me. But not you?”

“Life isn’t fair,” Mulder said softly. He kissed the base of her throat. Then grazed his mouth on her neck, tightening his thighs on her hips. “I broke the rules because you wanted me to. And I wanted to. Because I love seeing you come. Life is so short, Scully, no matter how long it is, I’ll never see that enough.”

He pulled back to look in her eyes, his gaze on hers, back and forth. The words were so sincere that it made her heart ache, but also he was checking to make sure he got credit for that one. She knew exactly what he was doing. 

Scully gave him a look. _I know what you’re doing._

Mulder shook his head. _I don’t know what you mean._ The worst at playing innocent. 

“Doesn’t that apply to me too, then? If I want _you_ to come?”

He still held both of her hands. 

“Then break the rules, Scully.”

The day outside was fading. Gold light from the sunset shone in squares on the wall. Scully turned her wrists in his hands, easing her hands down so that she held his, palm to palm, their fingers threaded together. 

Mulder’s thumb stroked her thumb. He relaxed a fraction and that was the second Scully tightened her grip, effectively reversing his pin, keeping his hands there as she wrapped her legs up around him. She shimmied his hips, her toes hooking his jeans. He wrestled her for control, a playful mock-fight as she got his waist bare, then his ass. His breath went uneven as she dragged his boxers down too. 

He made a _huh_ shape with his face. “Good girl,” he told her, a gravelly voice that belonged with his grin. Then he flipped the room right side up, rolling onto his back, landing her on his stomach, her arms, with her fingers still threaded through his, held behind her back. 

It was something she normally fought. She did not like to be restrained in any way, other than some brief teasing foreplay. But Mulder was holding her hands, checking her reaction. She was checking it too. When the grin spread on her face it was mirrored on his. 

She stretched back behind her. He tightened his grip, testing her. Showing her she had all the power, this was all in her hands. 

“Let me go, just a little,” she said. 

“Why?”

“Because I can’t reach that far.”

He kept his grip firm. His eyes: too bright. Too happy.

“Why?” Mulder asked again. 

Okay, if he wanted it that way. Scully steadied her balance, shifted her weight backwards, rolling her hips against his. Noting with great satisfaction how much effort it took him to bite back his groan. 

“Because I said so,” she told him that time. 

He obeyed her, letting his grip go just slack enough that she could reach down behind them. With his jeans pushed down his thighs, the only thing left between them was her underwear twisted around her. She ignored that for the moment, instead sliding her hand down the length of his erection, sliding back up to position him for her, holding him there as she went by feel, this time dragging his cock through the slick folds of her cunt. 

Mulder could not bite back his groan. He squeezed her wrists, saying something, their arms crossed behind her. She thought he said, _You don’t fuck around, do you?_ Scully bit her lip, focused on controlling their bodies, moving down on him, torturing him by showing how easily she could slide him inside her, except that she wouldn’t. 

“Grab my ass,” she requested. 

He would laugh if he had any breath. She would too. Instead, her eyes shone, seeing the pleasure it gave him when she was so direct. Their hands were a tangle behind her. Somehow, her grip switched to his wrist as he took hold of her ass, palmed the soft flesh and squeezed, spreading her open. 

Her shirt was gone. She was not even sure when that had happened. A long time ago, back when he knelt by the bed. She wanted his shirt gone too, the bare expanse of his chest, but the only thing on her mind now was his hands, squeezing and kneading her, and the heat and hard drag of him between her thighs. 

“Mulder.” A soft chant. “Mulder, Mulder.”

She felt the sound he made in his chest. It traveled beneath her, through her, her hips moving faster as she wanted to come. She crushed her body to his. Mulder let her, gripping only her ass, lifting her up and down as his hips made soft, wet smacks against her. She changed her mind, wanting him deep inside her, right now, informing him of this change of plans, but he made a sound and then came before she could get him there, saturating the jeans bunched up between them, the cum slick and sticky on the back of her legs.

“Goddamn it, Scully,” he whispered in awe.

“No, not yet.” Scully went limp with defeat, laughing in spite of herself as she collapsed down beside him. She bemoaned the agony of her thwarted climax, even as she glowed in satisfaction at his. But Mulder was rolling her onto her back, propping himself up beside her, turning her body so that her lap was resting on his. 

“Take them off,” she said, “please,” when he thumbed the cotton briefs she somehow still wore. Instead, Mulder wrapped his fist on the fabric, tugging upwards, not down. Her breath caught in her lungs at the bite of friction against her.

“Oh,” she said. Surprised. “God.” 

He pressed a grin with his kiss at the edge of the bra she somehow still wore. Where did all these clothes come from? “This,” he murmured against her, “is for breaking the rules.”

Rolling her hips with the tug of the fabric. 

“I can’t— oh, God. I—”

“You can’t what?”

“Come,” she said. “Like this. Not—”

“Not like this?”

Mulder increased the pressure against her, relentless. She felt it building and building, her body’s betrayal. Proving her wrong. Proving him right. The utter ridiculousness of it made her gasp, made her laugh. 

“ _Fuck._ ”

He agreed, “ _Fuck._ ”

Just like the night before, the second wave took her under. She came up gasping for air, her thigh muscles shaking. Mulder waited there, grinning. Too pleased by half that he’d turned the tables on her. He flopped down on the bed, taking her in his arms when she rolled against him. 

Scully groaned with her head on his chest.

“Who’s bad at this now?” he asked her again.  
  


* * *

  
Scully had no idea what she expected. _Field of Dreams,_ maybe. This was Bruce Willis trying to shoot down an asteroid. 

“Mulder, this movie is terrible.”

“Scully, this movie is a modern-day classic. It’s _Citizen Kane._ ”

She swallowed her mouthful of ice cream. “ _Modern-day_ classic? Just that term is an oxymoron.”

They sat on his couch, the screen flickering over them in the dark. Fully dressed again. _Mostly_ dressed again. Scully wore a clean pair of his boxers, his New York Knicks t-shirt. They had dressed each other by the bed, rummaging through his clean laundry. Mulder wore pajama pants and his other Knicks t-shirt. She had never established the firm count of how many he had. 

“That’s not implausible.” Scully scoffed. “It’s impossible.”

They were barely past the first scenes, the one where an asteroid “the size of Texas” could explode with “the force of 10,000 nuclear bombs.” Or something like that. Just trying to pay attention was making her head hurt. 

“Yeah, but Scully,” Mulder said. “Bruce Willis! _Die Hard_? Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.”

Scully frowned at him sideways, the spoon sticking out of her mouth. “It’s a good thing you’re not getting laid tonight.”

“You’re not incredibly turned on right now?”

“Less and less by the second.”

Mulder chuckled. 

They had signed a ceasefire. Standing there in the bedroom, once their legs had regained some function. No funny business. No fooling around. They had used up their allotment for the rest of the night. That was about the time Mulder had lowered the t-shirt over her head, eyeing where it stopped at the top of her thighs. Bemoaning already that she was not making this easy. 

No, she had said. She was making this hard. 

Exactly the type of humor that was off limits tonight. 

They were successful so far. Her knees rested in his lap. His arm circled her back, hand down the waist of her boxers, cupping only the very top of her ass. _This is so I don’t think about it,_ he’d said, defending his point of view on the matter. If he sat over there, he explained, and didn’t touch her at all, then that would be the only thing on his brain for the rest of the night. 

Scully accepted this dubiously. They’d had little success with not touching at all, though, so she was willing to test the hypothesis. 

“Ugh, Mulder. See?” She gestured at the screen. “The director of NASA is Dan Goldin. This is blasphemy, giving this guy his name. No director of NASA would let that sentence come out of his mouth.”

Mulder sighed. “This isn’t working. Terrible movies are supposed to kill the mood. You’re making me hot with these factual inaccuracies.”

“Here,” Scully said, sticking the spoon heaped with ice cream into his mouth. 

He shuddered, gasping as he gulped the bite down. “Ow. Why did we refreeze that? Way to give me brain freeze.”

Scully tried hiding her smile with her own bite of ice cream. “Mulder, shut up.” Adding under her breath, “Brain freeze might do you good.”  
  


* * *

  
“First boyfriend.” Mulder yawned. “Go.”

“You know that one.”

“No, I don’t.”

She jogged his memory, the son of a lieutenant on the base where her father was stationed. Cpt. Scully had been against the match from the start, relieved when it didn’t last the summer of her junior year. 

“Oh yeah,” Mulder said. “I did know that.”

He was bored. In all improbability, they had made it through the movie, talking through the latter two acts. And then the end of a ballgame— Bulls versus Celtics, NBA instead of Major League. Now, Scully was seeing how long she could restrict him to casual date topics. The result was that they were both growing drowsy, which was reason enough for her to continue. If she couldn’t remember the last time she had woken up after 9 AM, she certainly couldn’t remember the last time she had fallen asleep before 10. 

“I know. _Last_ boyfriend?” Mulder said. 

Scully was stretched out on the couch, both pillows behind her. Mulder leaned back against her with his head on her shoulder. He tipped his head back, giving her an expectant grin. 

She had never once referred to him as anything other than her partner, or that even more ambiguous term: friend. Not boyfriend, not anything else. It didn’t stop him from trying to hint that he might be, seeing if he could win the stalemate on semantics. 

“I think you know that one too,” she said. 

“I do?”

“Early 1992. March.” His hair slid through her fingers. Scully measured how much it had grown in six weeks. “You need a haircut.”

Mulder tipped his head back again. Confused, he asked her, “You don’t mean me, right?”

“You?” Scully said, confused too. “No. I mean when my last relationship ended. Not when it started with us.” Then she clarified, “Our _professional partnership_.” Not giving him an inch. 

“Before Oregon?” he asked. “Or after?”

Scully sighed gently, laying her cheek on his head. “You didn’t know that?”

“What happened?”

She tried to think back. What _had_ happened? Nothing had happened. She had flown to the other side of the country, she had come home and the guy she was seeing had a book on her nightstand and a coat in her closet. That was when she remembered they had been together three months. She had not called him from Oregon. Had not even thought about him after she boarded the plane. 

“I didn’t take that to be a good sign,” she told Mulder. “I thought there was going to be a fight, and I realized, I didn’t care enough to fight with him about it. It turns out, he wasn’t even upset. He understood. He was one of those guys who’s gracious and complaisant and doesn’t even mind if his girlfriend flies three thousand miles with a hot, crazy lunatic who thinks time can stop on the side of the road.”

She caught the edge of the smile that spread across Mulder’s face. Scully had slipped the ‘hot’ part in for his benefit, to make up for the negotiation of semantics that he continually lost. Sure enough, that was the part he took away from her story.

“You thought I was hot,” he said, satisfied. 

“That,” she said, “was completely irrelevant in the chain of events. It’s simply a detached, objective observation that had no bearing whatsoever.”

He was nodding against her. 

“I thought you were hot too.”

Scully smiled in spite of herself, glad they were both facing across the room and he couldn’t see it. Then she sighed in his hair when Mulder reached up for her hand. She could get nothing past him, not even that. He squeezed the tips of her fingers, drawing her hand up, playing his fingers through hers. She watched their hands move, how much larger his were than hers. Palm to palm, he outsized her by almost an inch.

“Scully? If I asked you a question, you’d tell me the truth?”

She hesitated. “Yes? Maybe. Okay.”

“Did you think about me? On that trip. After. When you weren’t thinking about him.”

The screenprinted basketball on the front of his shirt was cracked and faded from washing. Scully touched the orange that flecked off. 

“No,” she said. 

She let go of his shirt as Mulder turned in her arms, shifting onto his side. He read her gaze, back and forth, to see if she was lying. She was lying. He saw it. He didn’t smile, didn’t chuckle. The happiness that spread in his eyes was more serious than that. 

“What did you not think about?” he asked. 

Scully rolled her thumb on his lip and didn’t answer.

“Do you know,” Mulder said, “the first time I felt it, the way I feel about you?” His voice had gone soft. “All of it,” he said. “The friendship. The partnership. The part where I want to tug you out of your clothes and toss you on the bed.”

She shook her head, no. 

“That first night. At the motel.”

Scully said, “When I came to your door?”

“No. The first night, before that. When I knocked on yours.”

She tried to remember. What she remembered was Mulder bouncing around outside her door, Yankees cap twisted backwards on his head at 2 o’clock in the morning. 

“You opened the door,” he said, “and you yawned and you had on that t-shirt that came to your knees and you said you weren’t losing sleep over any of it, but there were x-rays spread all over the bed and it was 2 o’clock in the morning. You shut the door in my face and I think my whole life changed.”

Scully was smiling, the look on her face that said _you’re ridiculous, you nut._

“That’s it,” Mulder said. “That’s the face. Right there.”

“Mulder, it didn’t happen like that. You’re only looking back on it through years of hindsight. You’ve given that one moment significance, when in fact, there would have to be hundreds of others that led to the…”

“That’s it, right there,” he said again, touching her chin and pressing a kiss to her lips.  
  


* * *

  
Mulder got to his feet. He brought Scully up with him, her weight easy against him as he lifted her in his arms. He walked her backwards to the bedroom, chest to chest, face to face, her arms around his neck, her knees around his waist. 

“Mulder,” Scully said, just inside the doorway. 

“Scully,” Mulder said. Not setting her down. 

Her voice was husky from kissing. “Does it still apply?” she asked him. “What you said today. If we want something that’s not in the rules, we break the rules.”

He stopped at the edge of the bed. 

“It still applies.” Mulder’s throat, just like hers, needed a glass of water. 

“No more second base,” she told him. 

Her stomach was pressed against his. She felt him breathing, the way he felt her. He shook his head, agreeing. “No more,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

Scully licked her lips, working up enough saliva to swallow. 

“I want,” she said, “to see how you come, if there’s a world where I don’t shut the door in your face, that first night in Oregon. And then what I want,” she said, “is for you to make me come the same way.”

The room was dark. She needed more light to see the look on his face. His voice, when he spoke, was ragged and warm. “Scully,” he said, setting her down on the bed, pulling her up on her knees so he could bring her face close to his. 

“This is why I don’t need normal,” he said. “I’d rather have us than anything normal.”


	3. Third Base

Scully unclipped her ID badge, swiping the keycard, punching four digits into the pad on the wall. It beeped, flashing green, the lock _chunk_ ing open. She pushed through the door with her shoulder, nodding hello to the guard in the booth who looked up when she entered. “Hi, Jerry. Morning.” He waved her on through. 

Quantico. Monday morning. She was on her second cup of coffee, rested for the first time in weeks. The eight hours of sleep last night made her resolve to get eight hours more often— and a little bit sad that she had to aim for something so simple. 

The halls were quiet this morning. Scully found 203, the lab she was assigned for the day, and when she opened the door, found another thing to be grateful for. She was processing skeletal fragments that day, compiling toxicologies on a variety of samples. No formaldehyde wafting out. No stench that would cling to her even after three showers, scrubbing every inch of her skin with industrial-strength soap. The smells rarely got to her, which was one reason she’d been cut out for forensic medicine. But she still hated that she couldn’t shed the stench as easily as her scrubs. It followed her home, made the people around her wrinkle their noses and take a step back. Mulder was nearly as used to it as she was by now, and still there were times he buried his face in her hair or her neck and was quick to pull away. 

A knock at the open door. Scully was pulling off her blazer, hanging it on the chair. The lab tech lifted the gifts she came bearing, a tray with glass vials that rattled, each one holding a fragment that looked like melted wax. 

“These are yours, right? Morning, Dana.”

Scully lifted her hair out of the collar, adjusting the lab coat on her shoulders. “I believe that’s my date for the day, yes.”

“We got them sorted and tagged Friday for you. Didn’t know if you’d be in over the weekend.”

Scully shared a smile with the lab tech, a bright young woman named Caroline who worked the same late hours and long weekends that Scully often did. More than once they’d shared a meal out of the vending machine, hunched over a microscope, feeding their analysis into the computer. 

“You requested me on this one,” Caroline said. “I appreciate it.” 

“Don’t tell me you spent the weekend here, though. If you do, I won’t ever request you again.”

Caroline smiled, edging into a grin, slightly shy with her happiness. “Actually,” she said. “No. I spent the weekend in Maine. It went from spring back to winter, but—” She leaned in, admitting dirty secrets. “It was wonderful.”

Scully laughed. “Look at us,” she said, proud of them both.

“You too?”

“Not Maine, but…” she admitted, “fairly wonderful.” 

“I thought I could tell,” Caroline said, practically beaming. She turned back at the door, holding her lab coat out at her sides, her hands in the pockets. “Monday morning. Normal hours. Who are we?” 

“Next thing you know, they’ll revoke our credentials.” 

“Oh gosh. Would they?” said Caroline. Mock horror that was actually hope. Then she squared off her shoulders, showing Scully her process of composing a serious, professional face. Before she ducked out the door, one last secret grin bubbled up to the surface, then popped, disappearing, and Caroline was gone, heading back to her lab. 

Scully sighed, not quite an unhappy one, turning to the tray that sat on the desk. “Well,” she said, out loud. Forgetting for a second the office was empty around her. _Let’s get to work,_ she finished in her head.  
  


* * *

  
Her phone rang. Scully dropped her pen to the desk, snapped off one glove, clicked the phone on and heard:

“I can’t find the Lippman casefile. Where did we file it?”

She tucked the phone in her shoulder, lifting the glasses she wore to scratch at her eye. The chair squeaked, tipping back.

“You mean,” Scully said, “where did _you_ file it. It’s not under the L’s?”

“I’ve been through the L’s twice.”

She could hear drawers slamming shut, sliding open. That familiar sound, usually part of the ambient background as she worked. There was no looking up, though, to watch Mulder’s shirt stretching across his back as he twisted and tugged his way through the cabinet, pulling files.

“That’s where I put it if I filed it,” she told him. “Did you pull it last week?”

Mulder sighed. “Did I? No idea. I don’t think so.”

She heard a muted crash, what sounded like two or three folders hitting the floor, their contents spilling. 

“What was that?”

“What was what?” 

Scully swiveled her chair, content with his silence over the phone. It lasted a moment.

“Hey!” Mulder said. “Scully. Wait. I think you’re right.” His voice went muffled, the phone tucked to his cheek. “I did pull it, right after you said that would be a good reference, if it comes up in cross.”

“I thought you did.”

“Aah, Scully. You’re a genius. It’s in this stack on your desk. That just bought me an extra two hours before my headache starts.”

“Mulder,” she said, “I don’t know why you leave this stuff to the last minute.”

“I didn’t leave it to the last minute,” Mulder said, cheerful. “I pulled it last week.”

Scully was shaking her head at him as she clicked end on the call. She sat there a moment before she returned to her work, giving her eyes a rest from the strain. Mulder prepping the court case made her think down those lines, picturing for a moment that call recorded and played back for a jury. They would get off clean. Business as usual. There’s no way someone would hear the soft hook he put at the end of the word _genius._ No way someone would catch the slight pause on each end just before they hung up. There might be speculation over the smile in Mulder’s last words, but it would be determined that it was just Mulder, joking around.

Scott free, unless anyone noticed the way she chose her shirt for the collar, the one that reached high enough to hide the bite of purple her makeup did not quite conceal. Or, apparently, unless anyone read either the look on her face or a general aura about her, the one Caroline had seen with no problem. Scully had years of experience preparing that same face before she stepped out the door— serious, professional, hiding everything that was the opposite. She touched her hand to her neck, sharing a small smile with herself. Maybe with age came the wisdom that sometimes it did her more good than harm to let that mask slip.

The desktop chimed with an email. She had left it signed in, awaiting a report Caroline was supposed to send within the hour. Scully rolled the chair over, tapping a key on the keyboard to bring up the new message. 

Charles Adams. 

Mulder had a dozen different accounts, fmulder@fbi.gov the one he used the least often. She had become quite the expert at identifying which aliases belonged to him. This one was too easy. Charles Darwin, Douglas Adams. She tapped twice, scrolling down.

A link. Scully frowned, trusting him enough to click it. The frown turned into a smile. The rate schedule for season tickets at Nationals Park.

A master of subtlety, her partner was not. Scully clicked reply, let the cursor blink a few times, then thought better of it and closed the message. She checked her watch. 11 AM. The downside to such a rested start in the morning was how long the morning lasted. She did some mental math, snapping on a new glove, sharing that small smile with herself one more time as she checked the label on the next vial, the fourth from the last.  
  


* * *

  
Scully worked straight through lunch, munching a spinach salad over paperwork at the desk. It was by all appearances a return to bad habits, except that by eating lunch in the lab, she finished a full hour early. By 3 she had catalogued everything that she needed, sent the fragments back out for processing. She spent the next hour being professional, clacking out a dozen replies to emails in her inbox, then left a dozen more for later, collecting her blazer and briefcase. She stepped out into a parking lot filled with late afternoon sun. 

It sank in the west, the light shining orange, bright in her eyes as she threaded through streets that took her back into the city. An hour later, Scully was dialing Mulder’s number from his apartment door, 5:15 PM. His car was not there, his mail still in the mailbox. She carried it with her, tucking the phone in her shoulder as she fished the key in his lock. 

Mulder answered the phone with what sounded like _Garflghargh._

“Mulder?” 

More unintelligible sounds. She held the phone away from her ear as it crackled. Then the connection cleared, just in time to hear him say _traffic_ and _goddamn_ and _beltway,_ all part of the same sentence.

Stuck on the Beltway. In traffic.

“Why are you on the Beltway?”

Mulder laid on the horn. She could hear it over the phone, prompting a musical chorus honking back at him. 

“I have no idea,” he said. “Because I’m an idiot? I’m getting off the first chance I get.” 

“Well,” Scully said. “I hope not. Not until you get here.”

A long pause. She guessed it was Mulder trying to decide if she’d said what he thought she just said. 

“Are you there?” she asked him. 

“Agent Scully. Did you just proposition me?”

Okay, this call would not play for a jury. She steered them back on course, giving him the preliminary findings from the day spent at Quantico. He asked her a question, then said never mind, he’d take a look when he got there. 

“Where are you?” he asked. “Already there?”

“Your place? Yes.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. God help the cop that tries pulling me over.”

Scully smiled. 

“Check your email,” Mulder said. “Feed the fish. Tell them I’m coming.”

If that was more double meaning, it didn’t sound like he realized it. 

“I’ll be there shortly. Just as soon as I can.”

She clicked off the phone. “Hey fellas,” she said, lifting the lid on the fish tank.  
  


* * *

  
Scully tidied things up. Mulder, never exactly one to keep house, had picked up the dishes that morning, found clean sheets in the closet, and that was about it. She straightened the pillows, folded the blanket he kept over the couch. Nudged the coffee table back in place on the floor. She found popcorn beneath it, and was brushing it off her hands into the trash when she noticed his computer was on. 

She thought about it. Then sat down, clicked the mouse, bringing the screen to life. The web browser was open, the way Mulder checked mail on all his different accounts. She wondered for a moment, then typed out a name, entered her password. Waited for it to log on. She had her own anonymous email, set up years ago, courtesy of the Lone Gunmen. 

Her inbox: 1. 

She saw the sender and smiled. 

She read the subject and clicked it. 

She saw the first line and blushed. 

His suggestion had been so oddly specific: _check your email,_ when he knew she’d been on it that day at Quantico, forwarding him results that came in from the lab. The message was timestamped that day, at 3:12 PM. She read it. She stood up, she got a glass of water, then she came back and read it again.  
  


* * *

  
Mulder came through the door, half an hour later. A thump, his keys jangling. The door swung open. He bumped his way through it, catching the bag on his shoulder in the too-small gap. “Shit,” he said to himself, around the pen in his teeth. It came out more like _schitt._ He got the door closed. The phone was tucked to his ear and the back of the door was the best available surface. He laid his hand there, scratching the pen on his palm, trying to get out the ink.

“Hold on. The last four,” he said into the phone. “4-8-6-9?” 

A pause. “Nine,” he repeated. “What?”

Mulder shook the pen, trying to scratch it again.

“ _Five?_ ” he said. “4-8-6- _5_. You’re kidding.” 

He caught the phone as it slipped. 

“That’s gotta be it. I owe you one, Danny. You saved my ass.” Mulder clicked the phone off, sighed at the ink on his palm, turned halfway and stopped.

Scully stood there waiting. She cleared her throat, dropping her hand away from her collar. Leaning into the doorframe a few short paces away, at the edge of his living room.

Mulder sank back so the door caught his weight, clearly enjoying this moment, clearly forgetting whatever the call had been about. 

“Danny?” Scully said.

“Everybody,” Mulder said, and waggled the phone, “has great timing today.”

“Ah,” Scully said.

She held out her hand. Mulder pushed off the door, handed her the pen first as he joined her across the room. He dropped the bag off his shoulder. Dropped his coat too. She took his hand, palm up.

“I got the fax number wrong.” He shook his head, preempting further inquiry. “Don’t even ask.” 

The ink had already smeared. Scully found the notepad he kept behind his badge, tucked inside his suit pocket. She copied the number down, flipped the pad closed, clicked the pen, handed both items back. 

Mulder gave her a look. Which softened into another look.

Her look was already soft. 

“You’re hired,” he told her. Confiding, “I think I need a new partner.”

She caught his hand, checking for ink that might smear on her blouse, licking her thumb to wipe it clean before letting his hand slide around her. “What was wrong with the old one?” she said, going into his arms. 

Mulder stepped her close, bringing her elbows up to rest on his shoulders, lightly encircling her waist. “She ditched me,” he said. 

Scully tried hiding a smile. His shirt had come back from the dry cleaner with too much starch. It rustled between them. She kept telling him he needed to find a new dry cleaner. Mulder, creature of habit, loyal past all reason. 

He was listing more grievances.

“She stuck me with all the casework. You wouldn’t believe it. Her desk is a mess.” 

“She has a desk?” 

Mulder sidestepped it deftly. 

“I don’t think she checks her email,” he said.

He was ridiculous. He was also looking into her eyes, reading her gaze, resting their bodies together. It was why she went on. 

“What if I told you,” Scully told him, “that she does check her email.” 

Mulder’s head tipped to one side, his gaze sliding down, her hand sliding up through his hair. 

“She does?” he said, and he had flipped the switch. This was not coy, teasing Mulder. It was thoughtful, serious Mulder. Or they were both the same Mulder, overlapping each other. He touched the ends of her hair, the edge of her blouse. The delicate gold chain slipped between his fingertips as he pulled it straight.

“So does that count as permission?”

Scully had to swallow. “For what?” she said.

Mulder: he smiled. In love with her, proud of her stubbornness even in a moment like this one. No one had ever done that before Mulder, felt her sharpest edges and loved her for them, without trying to dull them into something safer to hold.

It made her love him back. It made her open up, let go of herself a little, trust herself with him, give back to him some of what he gave to her. It’s what she’d always wondered, what would happen to them if she said _yes_ and not _no,_ failed to keep him in check. Let him take the lead, without her pulling him back.

This was how she found out. By trying it out, seeing where it got them. Mulder’s breath on her neck, breathing her in and sighing.

“Permission for what?” she said again, wanting to hear it.

“You tell me,” he said softly. Brushing the words down her neck, his hands down her arms. “What’s the one thing you want?”

Scully knew what that was. Her whole body knew. His whole body did too, beginning to press against her. The only thing she had wanted since Saturday night. The only thing he’d denied her. 

Mulder leaned back, looking her in the eye before he leaned down and kissed her. Lifting her face up to his. A long, slow kiss, one that deepened and wandered, like he had taken her hand, walking her through a maze that twisted and turned, folding back on itself. On the other side of it was where she pulled back, breaking the kiss to breathe air.

He wrapped his hand around hers. Looking hungry and kissed and reckless and happy. The whole room between them and the bed. 

She could tell him right now. “We’re not going to make it to midnight.” 

Mulder shook his head. “No, we’re not,” he agreed.  
  


* * *

  
They made it to the bed. Done with the rules that might keep their clothes on or their bodies apart. The gray light in the room was soft as her laughter as Scully unhooked his slacks, pulled his shirt over his head. Mulder was kissing her stomach, licking there, nibbling, biting. Anything that might tickle, make her squirm in his hands. He pulled his palms down her legs, taking her underwear with it, a sigh and a hum with the bite he took of her waist. 

“Mulder,” she told him. Her arms wrapped around him, holding his head to her chest as he brought her into his lap. And then down on the bed, her weight tipping them backwards. 

He landed, arms splayed, her turn to roam over his stomach, his chest. The hard knot of his nipple slid into her mouth and he broke the new rules he’d just made about letting her do what she wanted. His hands pulled her down, then slid, squeezing around her. Her ribs, her waist. Hips. The back of her thighs, up to the curve of her ass. 

“Mhmm,” he hummed deeply. Keeping her mouth on his chest when she tried to drift lower. She tried again. 

“Mulder,” she said, muffled against him. 

His hands framed her face when she lifted her head, her hair already tangled. He had flipped the switch again, serious. His eyes warm but not teasing. “I changed my mind,” he said. “Tell me.”

His bare feet hooked with hers. “Tell you what?” Scully asked him.

“You know what,” Mulder said. “I want to hear yours.” 

Scully kissed his palm, resting her face there before she turned back to look in his eyes. She knew what he meant: what he wrote in that email. It was dirty and sweet and an impossible use of the desk in their office. Now she would think of it at least half the time she walked into the basement.

“This,” she told him, honest. “Right here. It’s what I’ve wanted all day.”

Mulder hooked her hair back. “That’s not specific.” He kissed her mouth when she sighed. He had smiled. “Tell me,” he said.

It was easy to say it, easier than she thought. She touched her thumb to his lips. Mulder rolled her over before she could speak, flat on her back with his weight easy above her. Scully changed her mind too: he should not cut his hair. She took whole handfuls of it, let it fall through her fingers. 

“You would walk in the door,” she said, her voice soft and subdued. “If I was sitting there working, you’d drop it out of my hands. Lift me up off the floor, as if you didn’t have me that minute, you’d never have me at all.” 

Scully held onto his gaze, wanting to see the look in his eyes. When he finally kissed her it was like a dive straight to the bottom of a deep body of water. A calm, sure dive. Determined to reach it, what was down in those depths.

She slid her hands around him. Pulling him between her legs, as close as she could get him. All of his skin, all of her skin. And then her hips in his hands, lifting her up off the bed as if he did not get inside her, both of them might starve.

Scully bit her lip on the smile. That lost, sweet smile, her whole body arched, Mulder’s fingertips spreading up and over her stomach as he eased her down on him. Then holding her still with his palm. Letting his hips ground her for the slow, hungry fuck they would build faster and faster, until one of them broke, and then build it again until they broke the other. 

“Don’t come yet,” he told her, a new rule for them to break.  
  


* * *

  
“Oh God.” A groan. “Scully.”

A dark, happy laugh. His voice fucked hoarse and muffled, facedown on her chest. 

Scully brushed his hair off his forehead, stuck there like her own. His chest damp; her chest too. His skin pink in splotches where her hands had been.

“Don’t do that,” he said, “Scully. Not ever again.”

She was holding his head the way she might help him through a headache. Trying to catch her breath. Her eyes closed with a grin.

A long moment passed. Mulder mumbled something unintelligible. She summoned strength, then lifted his face from her chest. 

“You’ll never believe me,” he said. “I was going to take you out to dinner. That was my plan.”

His hair bent in all directions. In no shape to be seen outside this apartment. 

“Dinner?” she said, and started to roll out from beneath him.

“Oh no, you don’t.” Scully was far too pleased to be caught by his arm, tossed back down on the bed. “You’re not going anywhere, woman. I’m not done with you yet. We’re ordering in.”  
  


* * *

  
They ordered in. 

Nearly an hour later, or what Scully thought was an hour, of rolling around on the bed, for so long her head had started to swim. That’s when he left her there, all of a sudden just gone, nothing for her to do but drop back on the pillow, turn her face there and groan. Mulder returned with his phone, dropping back down on the bed. “Hello. Yes. Alexandria,” he told whomever took the call, then gave his full address. “Fourth floor. 42. Hold on,” he said. 

He had to lift her grabby hands off him.

“What do you want, your usual?”

Scully gave her assent to his chest, not even caring, conducting an experiment as he talked over her head, placing the order. Trying to see what it took to get his voice to falter. It was harder than she thought. He didn’t falter. Too many years of practice, his voice staying steady until he hung up phone. 

Then it went ragged, warm and broken just like she wanted. “You have got to be kidding me,” he groaned at the top of her scalp. 

Exasperation, amusement. Scully answered that for him, her mouth a slow _pop_ of suction on the head of his cock. 

“What do you want, your usual?” she repeated back to him, trying her best to play it serious. There was no way she could, not with Mulder half-laughing, half-moaning like he was in pain. 

“Fair’s fair,” she reminded him, and slid down with her hand to roll him back up to her mouth. 

Mulder fell back on the bed, sucking in a tortured breath through the edge of his teeth at what she did with her tongue. One hand stroking him, cupping him, sliding him wet in her mouth, Scully letting her other hand drift. Up and around his thighs, up and over his stomach. Dragging her fingertips lightly through the hair on his skin. His muscles clenched, and then tugged, Mulder trying to stand it. He exhaled sharply, made a sound, then filled his lungs again. 

She loved to do this for him. She loved to watch him— feel him— fight himself for control, then not even care when he lost it. He was a vocal partner; he swore and he praised, he had two dozen ways that he said her name. Pleading and fervent, desperate and joyful. He touched her face or her neck and then let his hand fall to the side, barely grasping her waist. Like it wasn’t enough to feel himself in her mouth, he had to read her body through touch the same way she read his. 

He grew desperate to come. He begged and he groaned and he laughed when the begging was useless. “C’mon,” he said, “Scully.” Only to have her kiss him gently and ease him back from the edge.

That was her plan, such that it was, to do this to him. What he’d just done to her. Get him there and then strand him, leave him almost all the way crazy. It was not to be cruel. It was to share it with him, show him what it was like when he left her like that, wanting him so badly she ached. 

It backfired a little. She got him closer and closer and then did not have the willpower; either that, or the heart. She finally did pull away, pulling a groan out of him as she crawled up his body, laid her head next to his. Her attempt to stick to the plan. Resting there side by side, Mulder no longer sounding _like_ he was in pain. He _was_ in pain. “Who are you tonight?” he asked, a short, ragged chuff of a laugh. Dark and wanting. 

“I don’t know,” Scully answered him. Truthful. And knew in that moment she couldn’t do that to him. They had stopped playing those games. No more stranding on third base. As much fun as it was. 

“Here,” she said gently. Kissing the side of his mouth, climbing up on her knees. One of his favorite positions. Mulder blinked. Addled and skeptical. Wary of tricks. 

“Mulder,” she said, her tone of talking him out of a bad idea, into a good one. Sweetly convincing. “We’ve got, what? Ten minutes, at best, until someone knocks on your door? You can’t answer like that.”

He chuffed another laugh, this one not quite as dark. But even more wanting. 

“Come on,” Scully said, trying to tug him up to his knees. “Then we’ll be on our best behavior. I promise.”

She came with him that time, Mulder deeper inside her than he’d been an hour ago, fucking her against the headboard until he pulled their hands off the wall, rocking her back against him, his arms crossed tight on her stomach as he held her upright, her back to his chest, the loose bounce of her breasts as he smacked his thighs into hers, giving her all that he had before their strength gave out. 

“There you go,” he gasped, breathless. They toppled onto the bed, dazed, sated, euphoric. “Oh my God.”

“What?” Scully panted, barely paying attention. 

Mulder tightened his arm on her waist, almost missing the side of her temple with his glancing kiss. “I should have known,” he said, closing his eyes again. “ _This_ is how you’re going to kill me.”  
  


* * *

  
Mulder answered the door. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, just as composed as he had been on the phone. He took the pizza, another box balanced on top of it, paying the guy forty dollars on a thirty-three dollar tab. 

“What was that?” Scully asked, walking into the room as soon as he shut the door. Mulder showed her the boxes. “I mean,” she said, echoing what she had heard, “’keep the change.’”

“What about it?”

“You never tip. You’re a bad tipper.”

Mulder did not bother to look aghast. “I am not a bad tipper.”

He popped the lid on the pizza, checking their order, setting it down on the table. 

“First the kid at the ballpark, now this?” Scully turned it around on him. “Who are you tonight?”

“Uh-uh,” Mulder said, swatting at her hand where she was picking the mushrooms off the pizza, popping them in her mouth. “Go. Get the plates.” And then, “Wait. You can’t reach them. I’ll get the plates, you go check my bag.” He redirected her by the shoulders, smacking her on the ass as he sent her toward the next room. 

Scully licked her fingers clean, found the bag in the chair where Mulder had dropped it off his shoulder when he came in the door. It was stuffed with files, packed so tight the zipper wouldn’t close all the way. The leather was soft and scuffed, next to the files just enough room for…

Mulder was setting the plates on the table when she reappeared. “Mulder,” she said, holding the bottle of Malbec. 

He looked up. “You found it. You think it’s a good one?”

The label said California, 1996. 

“There’s one way to find out.” Scully nudged him as she passed by. “Mr. My Plan Was To Take You Out To Dinner.”

She heard Mulder chuckle as she pulled open drawers in the kitchen, looking for his corkscrew. 

“Always have backup, Agent Scully. Rule #1.”  
  


* * *

  
They ate. Voraciously. Scully had not been hungry at all, only to take the first bite and discover she was starving. Mulder had half a slice of pizza in his mouth, washing it down with the wine, and still he looked at her digging into the meal like she was his sole source of entertainment for the night. The salad was for her, no onions, black olives, but she reached for the pizza too. She folded a slice of it to fit in her mouth, her eyes drifting closed as she savored the flavor. 

“Is it always this good?” Scully mumbled around it. “Cavino’s?”

Mulder pulled a second slice. “It’s never this good.”

They talked as they ate, far too comfortable with each other and ravenous with their appetites to care about appearances. She had been starving with him before, more times than she could count, inhaling greasy food on the side of a highway because it had been eight hours since her breakfast of coffee and grapefruit. She had been everything with him before— sick, exhausted, furious, querulous, naked, disheveled, near death. There was nothing they hadn’t been with each other, and all of it long before sex became part of the equation. He’d held her hair back as she vomited on an Arkansas highway; he’d picked her up off the floor of a rank Idaho bathroom. He’d helped her scrub blood off her hands and strip out of clothes that were covered in bile. She had seen him hauled off in handcuffs, beaten to a pulp, seduced by an ex-girlfriend, drugged out on painkillers, shot in the line of duty— all of that in the first months of their partnership. 

There were no new indignities they could suffer in front of each other. It was why— if she risked a guess— that Mulder, in bed, was like nothing she’d ever experienced. There was nothing to hold back. Mulder never did, and she met him there, no insecurities, no inhibitions. They could say anything, do anything, want anything, be anything, within the boundary of those four walls. Far from remembering in vulnerable moments that he was her colleague, she should act accordingly, that very partnership had created the intimacy that had grown so profound. 

It touched her. It humbled her. Scully found herself struck by it all over again, eight o’clock on a Monday night, sharing pizza at Mulder’s kitchen table. His bed, wrecked, in the next room; his shirt, wrinkled, the one that she wore. Half-buttoned, half-open, nothing on beneath it. When had it ever been like this with anyone? When would it ever be like this again?

The answer came to her easy and honest: it hadn’t. It wouldn’t. 

“Scully?” Mulder said. 

She realized she had grown quiet. Zoning out on his story. He’d eaten his fill of pizza, a third of it left in the box. His plate pushed back, the napkin crumpled on top of it. 

“You all right?” he asked her. 

She was done with hers too, the salad gone, the crust all that was left from her slice of pizza. 

“I’m all right,” Scully said, in a voice that told him she was more than all right. She was a lot more than that. 

Mulder took the last sip of wine, set his glass down, empty. Hers had been empty a few minutes ago. The buzz was warm, light, and pleasant in her head. 

“So,” Scully said. “I believe that counts as dinner.” 

His smile across the table. She tried to pretend, just for the sake of argument, that it did nothing to her. With no luck at all, so she kept a straight face and asked him:

“What did you have in mind for dessert?”  
  


* * *

  
“Taste this one,” Mulder said. 

Scully waited until she felt it touch her lips, then opened her mouth. It was sweet like the others, but sharper, with a tang. Soft and pulpy, almost the texture of an overripe plum. But not like the taste of an overripe plum. She swallowed it down and said, “Mango.”

Mulder’s mouth sounded full as he said, “Correct.”

How they had ended up here ten minutes after asking Mulder about dessert, she had no idea. She sat on the kitchen table, still dressed in his shirt. Mulder, in the chair by her knee, sliced fruit. It was the bag they’d brought home the day before, the stone fruit, like the peaches, already soft, ripening in just the one day. She wore, in the most absurd turn of events, his tie as a blindfold. Retrieved from the bedroom, tied around her head. It was more practical than erotic. She had tried keeping her eyes shut like he asked and found it nearly impossible.

“This one,” he said. 

Scully tasted peach, a pleasant mix with the mango. “Mulder,” she said, chewing. “Don’t tell me this is what you had in mind after dinner. Tying me up and feeding me fruit.”

“You’re not tied up, you’re blindfolded,” Mulder pointed out. “And no.” She heard a rind tear in his hands, instead of the knife scraping the plate. Mulder had laid the knife down. She could narrate most of his actions, her other four senses heightened. “What I had in mind,” he said, “was you out of your clothes in the bed. But you’re not in your clothes. And the bed’s a wreck. So I have to improvise.”

“Okay,” Scully granted, taking the next slice he offered. She wrinkled her face since it was an orange, tart and unexpected after the sweetness of the peach. “But this? Really? Fruit?”

“I think you’ll find, Dr. Scully, this is a fairly common fantasy among men.”

“I don’t think it is.”

She was enjoying it, giving him a hard time. He was enjoying it right back, which was why she continued. 

“Well, it isn’t when you’re sitting there talking about how it isn’t. C’mon, Scully. You don’t see how this could be, I don’t know, remotely erotic?”

It was… interesting. It was more amusing than erotic. It was also chilly, the cool table beneath her with nothing on but the shirt. She told him the last part. 

“I know,” he said. “I turned on the heat a few minutes ago. You’ll feel it soon.”

Now that she listened, she did hear the heat, stirring around in the vents. The apartment was that quiet. She felt it too, barely. What she had registered as air moving against her skin, and therefore cool air, was actually warm. 

“Mulder,” Scully said. She could hear him chewing. “What’s sexy about it?”

“Hmm?” he said. Or she thought he said. It might have been more like “Mmm.” She pondered that for a moment, how the sensations she felt were affected by her perception. The air moving was cool, not warm, because she had not expected it to be warm. Removed from all context, like the look on his face, she couldn’t be sure Mulder said _Hmm_ and not _Mmm._

“What’s sexy about it?” Scully repeated the question, sincerely, seriously. “I mean, to you. Not hypothetical men.”

She licked the next bite of mango off her lips, Mulder able to tell she had not liked the orange as much as the others. That’s what he was eating, the orange, because the scent of it momentarily overpowered the rest. 

“Well,” Mulder said, swallowing the bite in his mouth. “There’s the trust of it, first of all.” Answering her question sincerely, seriously. “When I do this,” he touched another slice of peach to her lips, “you’re trusting me that it’s something you’ll like, not anything bad. I’m not all of a sudden going to give you the cheese that’s been growing mold for the past year in my fridge.”

He grinned at the look on her face. She could tell that he grinned because of the sound of it in his voice. “Then,” he said. “There’s the sensory deprivation.” Mouth full again, he said, “Don’t tell me the fruit doesn’t taste more interesting and delicious because you’re paying full attention to every bite.”

Interesting was exactly the word she’d use to describe it, and also delicious, so she understood that one. 

“There’s the surprise of it, too,” Mulder said. “You trust me, but you still don’t know exactly what I’ll do. I could do this.” He tipped her chin down just enough to reach her from the chair, a kiss on her lips before she tasted the fruit. It was more like his smile pressed to her smile. 

“Mm. Okay,” Scully said. Enjoying the combination. The peach in her mouth with the hint of orange from Mulder’s. 

“That’s the last slice of peach,” Mulder warned her. Then said, “The absolute sexiest thing is how you’re not sure that it’s sexy.”

Scully frowned through the blindfold. She opened her mouth but was fed more of the mango. She had to take it and chew before she could go on. Mulder got to his feet, she felt him stepping around her. Confused, she turned in the direction she sensed him go. “What?” she said. “What does that mean?”

The floor squeaked, Mulder returning from the kitchen. “I’m right here,” he said. She’d raised her voice slightly to carry after him. He was standing in front of her. He kissed her again, this time holding her neck with both hands, rubbing his thumbs just a little beneath her ears. The spot that he knew made her knees weak. His right hand was cold. 

“It means,” he said, “most women would be going _mmmm, yes,_ things like that, because they’d know it’s supposed to be sexy. You, on the other hand, are asking me to explain why it’s sexy.”

“So what’s sexy is when I’m _not_ sexy.” Scully frowned through the blindfold again. 

Mulder chuckled. “What’s sexy is when you’re _you_. Which, I believe I said, is insanely sexy.”

When he kissed her that time, he did it easy and slow. Sliding his mouth against hers, letting her do what she wanted. The whole sensation was heightened, the tastes vivid, electric. Her skin started to tingle. She kissed him deeper, all of her focus fixed there. Usually, there was a lot more going on when they kissed. She liked nipping his jaw, gazing into his eyes, running her hands in his hair. This time, all it was was their mouths, back and forth. Mulder retreated, advanced. He kissed like a grown-up, knowing just how to drag her mouth slightly open, dig his hands up through her hair. When he stopped, her breath had gone shallow. Her head swimming, and not from the wine. Between her legs was heavy and warm. 

“You ready for something a little bit different?” he asked her. 

Her heart rate had climbed too. Her voice was slightly rattled. “What do you mean, different?”

“Trust me,” Mulder said. And then cautioned, “It’s cold.”

It was cold. Ice cold. He touched the spoon to her lips first, letting her know not to bite down like she had with the fruit. It was sweet, but with sugar, nothing like the ripe mangos. Mint and chocolate. The ice cream. He must have pulled it from the freezer when he’d gone for the fruit. It was soft, slightly melted, rich, creamy. 

“Yeah?” Mulder asked her. The smile there in his voice. 

Okay, she could see the erotic part now. Scully bit her lip, waiting for him to dip the spoon back in the carton. The second bite was a different experience, knowing what was coming. The flavors were complex, unexpected, more than she’d tasted last night. The sweet and the mint and the bitterness of the dark chocolate.

She let him know she wanted another. Instead, he took the bite for himself, then kissed her, the mint and the chocolate in his mouth. She made a small sound, involuntary. 

Mulder was opening her shirt— his shirt— down the front. It rustled, loud cotton. The fabric scraped her taut nipples, every part of her over-sensitized. “Trade you,” Mulder said, and she tasted the spoon again. The shirt hung on her, unbuttoned. The ice cream slid on her tongue, a distraction, as she realized he said, “I’m going to need this to come off,” and meant the shirt. 

Just like that, it was gone. Scully shivered, more from the delicious exposure to the air than from any discomfort. The cool hardwood tabletop beneath her bare ass, that was another sensation. 

“Scully,” Mulder said warmly. Rubbing the goosebumps on her arms. “Are you cold?”

Scully shook her head. Cold, yes, a little, but nothing she wanted to stop. She reminded her skin to feel the heat, too. It was tangible now, piling out of the vents up above, filling and warming the room. 

“There’s something I want to do,” Mulder told her. “And I know you trust me, but—” He paused. “At any point, for any reason, if you don’t like it, we’ll stop.”

Scully wanted to interrupt him, ask him all over again, _who_ are _you tonight?_ But she knew. This was Mulder. This was nobody but Mulder. This was the way his brain worked, never what she expected and a little bit crazy. 

“Pick a word,” Mulder was telling her, “and if you say it, I stop. No matter what we’re doing.”

“Stop,” she said. 

“Stop?” he said. “Now?”

Scully shook her head. “No. ‘Stop’ is the word if I want you to stop.” She could feel his skin close to hers, the heat radiating off him. Barely a whisper: “I don’t want you to stop.”

Mulder lifted her jaw, rewarding that with a kiss. The emotion he put into it told her what those words meant to him. “Okay,” he said. “That’s the word. If you say ‘stop,’ I stop.”

She nodded, only to find out she was already nodding. “What about ‘wait’? If I don’t want you to stop, but I just need a moment.”

“Wait,” he agreed. “Wait and stop. I’ll do both.”

Scully exhaled a shaky breath. “Jesus Christ, Mulder. How did this happen? Weren’t we just on first base? Taking it slow?”

He laughed. Deep and hearty. Kissing her on the forehead. “I have no idea,” he admitted, meaning how they got there. “You want to go back?”

“No!” she said brightly, and he laughed again just before she gasped because a drop of the ice cream— cold, icy— landed on her thigh. 

“Oops,” Mulder said, in a voice that didn’t sound like he meant _oops_ at all. It all fell together, exactly what he was doing, the moment Mulder stopped her hand from brushing the cold off her leg and then it was the heat of his mouth there instead, sucking the drop of it off her thigh.

Oh. _God._

Scully heard her own voice say the two words out loud, surprise in it, right alongside deep, unmistakable desire. She laughed too, a laugh that caught in her lungs with the breath she inhaled. Her clit reeled. She felt the pulse point at every sensitive part of her body, which was every part of her body. The next thing she knew, the cool hard table was flat on her back, the warm air above her, Mulder easing her toward him to reach the mint chocolate chip running down her thigh. 

“You have _got_ to be kidding me.” She breathed it out loud. Her thigh trembled slightly, Mulder raking it with a grin. She felt cool drops hit her stomach, his mouth going after them. Tasting more and more of her skin as he went. When mint chocolate chip hit her breast, she yelped from the surprise. He couldn’t reach that with his mouth, not without crawling up on the table, so instead, with wet fingers, he swiped it up, slid it into in her mouth. 

It was insane. He was insane, she was pretty sure, taking her right along with him. His hands, his mouth kept surprising her. Her body did not know what to do, where to expect him. Everywhere, it turned out. Everywhere but between her legs. The next time his mouth landed on the juncture of her hip and her thigh, she shifted toward him, trying to drag his mouth there. 

“S’that what you want, Scully?” he said. “Hold on. We’ll get there,” and she groaned. 

He slowed down. He started to make her wait for it, guessing where he might touch her next. He kissed her without the ice cream. He dripped the ice cream without following it with his mouth. His mouth stayed on her longer, hands grazing over her skin, everything heightened to an unimaginable degree just because she had no way of seeing what he was doing. 

She was attuned to him in ways she hadn’t thought possible, given how her senses were deprived of everything else in the room. She could sense when he started to want more and more, so turned on he could hardly stand it. His kisses grew feverish, each one lasting longer before he could tear himself away. 

“Mulder,” she said gently, and waited for him to hear her. 

Calm now, her arousal so heightened that it plateaued unless he did what she wanted, Scully told him exactly what she wanted him to do. 

This time, no hesitation. He had his mouth between her legs before she finished the words. Scully gasped, trying to find a grip on the smooth table, too slick. She found her grip on his hair instead, dragging his face against her. It struck her: the picture they made, sprawled on his dining room table, and laughed out loud when she discovered that she couldn’t care less. “Do this,” she gasped, “every night,” trying to push up on her elbows. 

Mulder laughed with her too, pulling her thighs apart so he could get some air. He mumbled something about hold on, wait for the best part, and then she sank back down on the table as she found out what he meant. He lifted her clit with his tongue, sliding it into his mouth like he was melting a piece of the chocolate. 

“You son of a bitch,” she breathed out, in lieu of a moan. Trying her best to hold back, aware, somehow, down beneath everything, their proximity to his front door. 

“Don’t do that,” he said.

They were talking in fragments. Halting, breathless. Preoccupied. 

“What? Don’t do what?” she said.

“Don’t hold back. Let go.”

Scully did. She melted, right there on his kitchen table, along with the ice cream. She stopped thinking about anything but the heat of his mouth. Her other four senses were gone, all that was left was his touch. Her body hummed on a frequency unknown to her. It did what it wanted, responding without her permission, since her permission was not something she would revoke.

When she came, her thighs shaking, she raised up, bending forward, pushing up off the table. Almost all the way up, slumped back on one arm, her other hand cradling the back of Mulder’s scalp. Her arm started to give and Mulder caught hold of her, pulling her forward. He slumped her against him, supporting her weight where he sat, his fingers stroking her gently, knowing how she hated the cessation of contact just because orgasm. Her cheek rested against his as she resumed breathing, and smiling, and saying his name. With his other hand, he pulled back her hair, then he was tugging the knot loose on the tie, pushing it up her forehead, letting her open her eyes. 

Mulder sat there smiling. A smile unlike one she’d seen on him that day, one that matched the look in his eyes. Scully became vaguely aware of the mess they had made, ice cream everywhere, the makeshift blindfold now like some ersatz bandana, her hair tangled and sticking out every direction. She knew what she must look like because of the amusement mixed with everything else in Mulder’s eyes. Like she was the four course meal to his starving stomach, but a meal that had unexpectedly started cracking jokes. 

“You cheat,” she said softly. “That whole thing… you knew what you were doing. You didn’t just come up with that on the spot.”

Mulder reached around, found the shirt. Used it to clean up his hand and some of the larger mess on her thigh. He shrugged, modest. 

“Scully. If I told you I wanted to eat ice cream off your naked, wet body on my kitchen table—” his eyes danced at that one, at the look on her face— “that’s just shock value. I wanted you to _want_ me to do it.”

“You cheat,” Scully said softly again. Mulder offered his hand to help her down to the floor, testing her legs. He was still fully dressed, she was surprised to notice. His t-shirt and jeans brushed her soft, aroused body as he lifted her up on her toes to reach his kiss. 

“Remind me,” she said, “to never date a psychologist.”

Mulder nodded his head. “I’ll remind you. Never again.”  
  


* * *

  
“ _Again?”_ Mulder said. “Scully.”

Eyebrows almost touching his hairline. Eyes bright and amused. Intrigued. He laughed when Scully placed her hand on his face, pushing his face away. He laughed when she groaned. 

“No,” she said. “Not again.” Trying to sound indignant, not amused. Defiant, not so whispery with arousal that she made herself blush. It was not working. None of it, not the part either where she was trying to contain herself like a grown-up so they could tend to him first. 

They had made it back to bed, Mulder bringing her there when she started pulling apart his clothes in search of bare skin. He was propped up on the pillows, watching her now, one of her hands on his chest, her other hand on his neck, trying to push and pull him at the same time. He was letting her do whatever she wanted. Enjoying how, suddenly, it had switched from his pleasure to hers. Not that they weren’t the same. 

“Scully. Believe me. This is my new favorite thing.”

“This is your _old_ favorite thing,” Scully reminded him, halfway to nonsensical. Shutting her eyes for a moment to steady herself. It wasn’t like this was new for them, any of it. Well, okay, some of it. 

Mulder pulled her forward, tangling his hands in her hair. “Some of it’s new,” he said next to her ear, like he’d been reading her mind. Utterly heartfelt: “I’ve never seen you like this. Not quite like this.”

“Yes, you have,” Scully argued softly. She took hold of his hands, pulling them away from her face, stretching their arms over his head instead. Using her weight to pin his arms back, just like he wanted. She loved the spark that brought into his eyes. She loved the way that made him roll his hips harder. His pleasure was her pleasure. If she had the necktie, she would knot it around his wrists, leave him tied there all night so she could keep going. 

Mulder made a strangled sound in his throat, and Scully realized she might have said that last part out loud. Oops. She still couldn’t be certain, which lasted all of two seconds before Mulder made her certain. 

“Is that what you think about, Scully? Because if we’ve established anything tonight, it’s that nothing you want to do to me is off the table.” His eyes shone as he said the word _table._

Scully tightened her grip on his wrists. Mulder tried very hard not to grin. Scully tried very hard not to notice how, to reach across him like this, meant more of her skin brushed his skin. 

“Ow,” he said, not meaning _ow_ in the least as she shifted around on him. 

There. She did spot the necktie, half hanging off the bed, where Mulder had pulled it all the way off her head as he laid her down. She was quick, stretching to reach it before he realized his hand was free. 

“Oh, no you don’t,” Mulder said as soon as he saw it, too late already. Scully roped his wrists together, Mulder barely able to conceal how he felt about this, his cursory protest including trying to reach up to kiss her, divide her attention. She hooked the tie on the headboard, tugging the end of it with her teeth to tighten the knot.

“There,” Scully said, surveying her handiwork. Sitting above him. She planted both hands on his chest, easing her hips back into a rhythm that went easy on them both. For a moment, it was just that, moving in silence. 

He hadn’t taken his eyes off hers. She watched them go through the sea change: like ocean water changing color at different depths. 

“Tell me,” Scully asked him, “what you want.”

Mulder relaxed, tucking his hands behind his head, stargazing. He shook his head back and forth. 

“That hasn’t changed.”

Scully licked her dry lips. Her voice with a soft rasp: “Which is what?”

“You,” Mulder said. “I want you to do whatever you want with me. I want to do whatever you want me to do to you.” He paused, seeing if he had sorted out the grammar of that one correctly. It took some focus. 

She waited. 

His eyes moved back to hers, the bottom of the ocean. 

“I want to live here,” he said. “I want to resign from the Bureau and stay in this bed so long we forget how to leave this apartment. I want to fuck you, and then make love to you, and then fuck you again, so many times your body doesn’t know what to do. I want you, Dana Scully, to look back ten years from now and remember tonight.”

The specificity of it, the sincerity of it, the _Mulder-ness_ of it, took the air out of her lungs. He wasn’t looking for credit. There was no box score. He was telling her the thoughts in his head, and Scully leaned forward, shutting her eyes as she laid her face against his. 

“Not fair,” she whispered, her breath on his cheek. 

Mulder shook his head, brushing the tip of her nose with the tip of his, back and forth. “Life’s not fair.”

The room tipped to the side, and then rolled all the way over. Mulder’s arms slid around her and then she was on her back, her knees at his waist keeping them locked together. The knot she tied was loose, the silk slippery. He had pulled easily free. Had been humoring her the whole time. 

It changed everything. Now his weight sank her into the pillows, now he was in charge of the way their bodies fit together. There was no way they could miss how she responded to that. Either one of them.

“You cheat,” Scully said, so full of affection it was barely a whisper. The words more of an endearment each time she said them. The fact that he cheated the rules of this game— the fact that his brain worked this way— was the reason she loved him. Him and not anyone else. 

“Scully?” he said in a low, gravelly voice after a long moment passed, in which the only sound in the room was the rasp of her skin on his. 

She was gripping his chest. His shoulder, his neck, anything she could reach. Trying to leverage her weight against him. 

Mulder shut his eyes. “I can’t believe…” he said under his breath, to himself. To her, he gasped out a plea, “Hold on. I need… just one minute.”

Before it got all the way through her brain, Mulder was pulling away, dropping facedown on the bed with a groan. His arm stretched across her. Scully tried catching her breath.

Her hand in his hair. “What’s wrong?” she asked him, her voice full of concern the moment it could be full of anything except sex. 

He shook his head. A dark chuckle. “It’s not. Nothing’s wrong.”

She tried shifting closer. 

“Ssh,” he said. Not moving. “Baseball,” he said.

“Baseball?”

“And icebergs,” he said.

Scully stared at him, sure that it was not just the arousal clogging her brain. He made no sense. 

“That’s what they say,” Mulder said. “Think about baseball and icebergs.” He ducked his head to cough into her shoulder, then cleared his throat. “Icebergs, that’s just dumb. And well, baseball…”

Another chuckle. He rolled his head to the side to show her his grin. 

“Mulder,” she said gently. She kissed the top of his head, which was resting against her. The small knot of concern untied in her stomach, became relief. Here she thought… after all, he was almost forty, she had turned thirty-five. She knew there were limits to what was physically possible. They rarely pushed it that far, the third time in one night. 

“So you _can_ come,” Scully whispered against the top of his head. “It’s just that you don’t want to.”

She knew he would love that one. He did. “Oh, I _want_ to,” Mulder said, tightening the arm hooked around her.

They lay there a long minute. Scully curled on her side, stroking his neck and his back. The moment grew intimate. It seemed strange to think of it that way— the moment _grew_ intimate, as if it wasn’t already, but the intimacy had compounded until it was something new. It’s what happened in hospitals, in various beds just like this one, when one of them slept and the other kept vigil. In those quiet moments was where their trust had been born. It was there now, the trust in his eyes. He could trust her with this. He could trust her with anything. To be there with him, the way he was for her. 

As long as it took. Scully let him decide. Smiling when his fingers, finally, entwined with hers, taking hold of her hand and lifting that arm away, the one that had folded to cover her breasts. 

“Do you have any idea,” Mulder said, so softly she barely heard him, “how beautiful you are?” 

The words were unexpected. He never did that, not because he didn’t feel it but because anyone could say those words, and did, often enough that they had begun to lose meaning. Scully had found that it didn’t much matter if she was beautiful; anyone could be beautiful. It was what men had told her in bed to get something they wanted, or not even that— it was what they told her when they weren’t looking past the beauty to see everything else that she was. 

Mulder did not say it like that. He said it because he did see everything else that she was. He never told her a lie; if it came out of his mouth, then it was the truth, it meant she had to try to believe it. 

“You know that, right?” he was saying. He was shaking his head. “I’ve never seen anyone like you. Not even close.”

Scully didn’t say anything. He didn’t expect her to, he just let the words lie there, let his hands tell her instead. One pad of his finger, tracing her jaw, then her shoulder. Up the curve of her breast. Taking her into his palm, warm and soft, with a kiss. 

Scully turned off the light. It took her out of his hand, stretching up for the switch, the lamp by his bed. Mulder rolled onto his back, waiting for her to join him. He caught hold of her knee when she knelt back above him, and Scully reached down, folded her fingers with his.

That was the hand she lifted first. She spread his palm open, upturned it, held it down on the bed. His left hand had gone to the side of her face and she turned her face, kissed it. Then did the same thing: upturned it, palm open. She brought it above his head. 

There was just enough light to look into his eyes, holding his wrists there until he understood. When he understood, Scully let his wrists go.

Climbing up off the bed, turning back at the door. He stayed right where he was, only lifting his head. 

“Stay there,” Scully told him, and then, “I won’t be long.”  
  


* * *

  
She returned from the kitchen holding a glass of water. The apartment was darker than it had been a moment ago, and she moved quietly, carefully weaving through the path on the floor. She had shut off every light, checked the front door and locked it. Heat still came from the furnace, the air warm and humid. She did not shut it off. 

Mulder, she sensed, shifted his weight on the bed. She couldn’t quite make him out, her eyes not yet used to the new dark. She felt her way, found the edge of the bed. Found the edge of the nightstand, set the water down.

He had not moved. The only sound he had made was a small chuff of air as she left the room; as he realized she really would walk off and leave him, even only for a minute. He made no sound now. Just the dip of the mattress as it took her weight. And his flinch, like she’d scalded him, when her hand brushed his side. 

“Ssh,” Scully said, laughing, laying her hand there. He puffed up his cheeks and exhaled a sharp breath, relief. Relief she was touching him; relief that, with her laugh, all he had to be was normal with her.

Normal for him, which meant he said, “Scully,” like it was a kind of plea. 

He had not moved his hands. She was checking them now. “If you move,” she said, making this up as she went, “I’ll stop what I’m doing.”

He had a better idea. “Just tie me up.”

Scully debated. “But if I tie you up, then it’s physical for you. This should be mental. Besides, you got loose. And I’ll want your hands to move, just not until I tell you.”

Mulder made a sound that sounded like, _fuck you,_ sincerely. She tipped his chin up and kissed him. The first test for them both. She made the kiss long, slow and deep, then shifted her body against him. He didn’t move, except to take both of his hands and grip the headboard with one, his own wrist with the other. Pinning himself down. 

“Good,” Scully told him softly, her fingertips tracing the rough edge of his jaw. A little awed at herself. If she stopped to think about what she was doing, it might be too ridiculous. It might make her stop. So she didn’t think. She would follow Mulder’s example, she would do whatever she wanted that came into her head. Whatever sounded interesting to her. Whatever seemed like it would be interesting for him. That’s what this was about, getting out of her head. 

Which, currently, meant Mulder was clenching his jaw, the muscle there jumping, the rest of him tense and perfectly still. She was touching his chin, his cheek, reading his face in the dark. Down to his shoulder, the hollow and dip of his clavicle, the knot in his throat that slid up and down. Finally he had to let go of his breath, take another breath in. 

That’s not what she wanted. “Mulder,” she said, “breathe.” Something between assuring and scolding, and greatly amused. This was so much more interesting than the blindfold and fruit. She laid her hand on his chest, until he drew deep, steady breaths. 

“Like that. Good,” Scully said, and climbed atop him. 

Only to ease herself all the way over, lie down on the other side. 

“Jesus,” he breathed, and the word came out in two parts. He grinned into her hand when she laid her hand on his face. 

Scully was grinning too. She let him feel it, pressing her grin to the inside of his arm, kissing that muscle that jumped, then she laid her head there. 

She couldn’t see all of him. Her eyes had adjusted and yet the room was still dark, no moonlight in the windows, the building next door blocking the glow of the city. She never realized his room was this dark. There was always some kind of light, the nights she was there. And she rarely slept over; that’s what they did at her place. That’s part of why this felt new to her. It was unprecedented that they had lived in his apartment for three straight days. 

“Do I break the rules if I talk?” Mulder asked her quietly.

Scully shook her head no, since she knew he could feel it. Her head on his arm. She liked when he talked. It was the way his mind worked, letting her into his thoughts. Plus it would help occupy him, buy her some leeway, buy him some time. 

“I had those stars,” he said. “The ones that glow in the dark? Above my bed as a kid.”

 _That’s_ what he was thinking? Mulder felt her laugh. “Shut up,” he said. He laughed too. “I’m trying to stand this.”

“Continue,” Scully said. She was feeling his mouth, running her fingers across it, like that was the way to interpret each word he was saying. 

He swallowed, hard. “Um.” 

“The stars,” she reminded. 

Right. “It’s how I’d fall asleep,” Mulder said. “I’d stare at those stars for so long, it would take my mind off anything. Like a kind of hypnosis. Or mental fixation. For hours. Except they wouldn’t glow for hours. They’d glow bright green and then fade, and I’d have to look harder but they would still be there.”

“Zinc sulfide,” Scully said. 

“Hm?” 

“The phosphorescence. Zinc sulfide. It lasts longer now, the compounds they use, but when we were young, the stars would fade fairly quickly.”

“You had them too?”

“Charlie did,” Scully said. 

Mulder paused for a moment. Her hand idly traced along the arch of his ribcage. It took some of his focus. “I’d lie there,” he went on, licking his tongue through his lips, “and try to find constellations. Of course I’d never find any. But I never could do that anyway.”

“You are bad at that,” Scully agreed. For someone who searched through the heavens for answers to mysteries that no one else could perceive. 

“Says the captain’s daughter. Unfair advantage.”

The room was quiet. It took her a moment to find it from memory, by feel in the dark. Mulder lifted his head. “What are you doing?”

He tried to look down. Scully allowed it. It was far too dark anyway. 

“You have Orion right here,” she said.

Her finger traced in a line angled down on his hip. The three freckles that would be there even in the dark. 

“Orion?” he said. His voice pitched down a register. He tried to clear it. 

She brushed his hip with her hand, which sank him back down on the bed. “Orion,” she said, thoughtful. “The hunter.”

“I know that one.” 

Scully nodded. He did. “Do you know what’s unique about that constellation?”

“Um,” Mulder said. 

She was not sure where it came from. The knowledge was just there. Long dormant and ready, something she had once read.

“Its brightest stars,” Scully said, “in relation to Earth, are at such an astronomical distance that they’ll stay fixed in the sky for millions of years. Long past Andromeda, or Perseus, or Cassiopeia has drifted apart. In millions of years, you could look up at the sky and still find Orion.”

It was rare she could tell him something he did not already know. She couldn’t tell if he knew; Mulder said nothing. Her hand drifted down, over his iliac crest, into the adjacent hollow and the coarse hairs that curled there. He did not make a sound. His hips lifted slightly, as if they were connected to her fingers through some invisible force. They might be. Scully didn’t much care about keeping him still. 

“You can’t come,” she warned gently, just to see what sound he made as she crawled down his body. She kissed across Orion’s three freckles and slid him into her mouth. 

Mulder didn’t groan. He grunted and swore, a curse soft and sweet at this confounding development. She knew he didn’t expect it, lulled into thinking she was taking her time with him first, his chest and his thighs, then the rest of his body. She would still take her time with him. Just in this order. 

She made a sound of her own, something like a small sigh at the way he felt and tasted. Earlier that night, it had been the sensation of him half-hard, growing hard. This was him hard, growing harder. She did not know how it was possible, and yet it was, the blood in his veins drawn down toward her mouth. This part was different too: she did not care what she looked like, the dark a kind of freedom. She rarely cared anyway— Mulder too permissive, too vocal about how he loved to see her— but still, there was a difference in the way that she let herself go when she did not have to look up and hold his gaze. 

She didn’t care when she made a mess of him, sloppy. She couldn’t care less when she made a mess of herself. From the feedback he gave, the difference was something he could not quite believe. Mulder gasped, lost for words. He fell completely compliant. With each clench of his stomach, he grew a little more desperate, until his every breath convinced her he couldn’t take it, he was trying his best and falling apart. 

Scully didn’t risk much, not cruel enough to push him past his limit. She let him go, wiped her mouth, kissed his poor, throbbing head, and crawled up his body to let him taste her mouth. Only a minute of that too, before she reached across him for a long pull of water, straight from the glass. 

She held it out to him, offering. Asking him if he needed water when he did not respond. Mulder opened his eyes, making a futile gesture with his restrained arms. “Time out,” she offered. “This doesn’t count.” 

Mulder took the glass from her, rolling up on his side in a wolfish manner. There was half of it left and he gulped it straight down. Scully had to laugh.

He did not think it so funny. He dropped with a groan back down onto the bed, still panting hard like he had sprinted a mile. The glass had made her hand cool and she laid it across his forehead. He finally grinned, and then closed his eyes, laughed. 

“Do you want me to stop?”

Scully felt his head move beneath her hand. Back and forth. No.

“Just take it easy on me,” Mulder said with a croak. “I’m not like you, Scully. I can only take so much.”

Full of affection, she kissed him. A little off target, bumping against his nose. He didn’t care. Momentarily still allowed the use of his hands, he pulled her close, lifting her hair back, cradling her head in his hands.

“I love you,” he whispered, his mouth against hers when he came up for air. The way he always told her. At the most importunate moments, when there was no recourse for her to take. 

Tonight, she just nodded. He raised up beneath her to kiss her again, dropping his arms above him to save her the stretch. She stretched there anyway. She wanted to feel it, and this time pay attention: his wrists in her hands, the way he was so much larger than she was, and stronger, but surrendering to her, doing whatever she asked. 

It felt so good to just rest there, to curl her fingers with his. Feel his heartbeat, his breath, his chest trapped beneath her. They were both damp with sweat, like it was summer, not winter. Their combined heat so hot that the air felt cool again, even when it was warm as it fell through the vents. 

“I don’t want you,” Mulder whispered, “to ever do this again.”

Making her smile. The only time that he lied: when she knew he was lying. When she knew he said one thing and meant exactly the opposite. 

“I won’t,” Scully promised. She reached down behind her, found him, stroked him with her palm and slipped him inside. 

“ _Ah_ ,” Mulder sighed. 

An understatement. 

Nothing in the world felt better to her tonight. Scully knew that he knew it; she knew he felt it too. They’d felt it hours ago when he first came inside her, and it only got better and better tonight. It felt exquisite in ways she could not quite describe, in ways that rendered her wordless. New and wondrous, what they did, and yet so familiar it was like coming home. Mulder might laugh outright if he knew the thoughts in her head. It bordered on mysticism, the kind of language he liked, souls twining and merging. Or he might not laugh, and that would be worse, the deep-sea look in his eyes and his hips moving harder, more at that moment than she could currently take. 

“Scully.” A pause. “Scully.”

She heard him, so quiet that she opened her eyes. 

Her hips had started moving of their own accord. Gently, but enough. She still pinned him down, this angle grinding her pelvis in direct contact with his. His eyes were clenched shut, his lip caught in his teeth. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry.” 

He laughed out loud, absurd. 

“Don’t be,” he said darkly. 

She slipped him out, laid him against her stomach. Easing upright, all the way, letting her heels take her weight. He bent his knees up behind her, letting her sit back against his thighs.

Mulder grunted, a little, at the way they still fit together. The lovely curve of his cock nestled right there against her, wet and hard, over-sensitized to each breath and each touch. She grazed her fingers around him, so lightly, so softly, that she touched the air around him, instead of his skin. She found the folds of her labia, slid herself along his shaft. Again, then again.

“You feel—” she said, quiet, and did not find the words. He had stopped breathing. 

“Scully— I can’t—”

“Mulder? Give me your hand.” 

His palm, right away, clutched her ribcage, her waist. Making her smile. She linked her fingers with his, rolled his palm across her skin. Over her stomach, her sternum, to the curve of her breast— he squeezed, cupped her there. The reverse of Saturday night. Another squeeze, lower. In soft, squeezing pauses, she guided him down between their legs.

“Scully,” he said, with something like awe. Content with his life in ways he hadn’t thought possible. She let him feel it, their fingers entwined. Rolling his palm down his cock, his hand wrapped beneath hers like they had done that first night. 

This was better. This was different. This was her getting ready to let him have what he wanted. She showed him all over again, how to touch her, where to press her, the tip of his fingers warm as he slid them inside.

She was open and slippery. Mulder did not say a word, just focused all of his senses, going by feel, not by sight. A new heat coursed through her. She held onto his wrist, felt every tug and pull through his tendons. Reading his body like that, the way she might read his gaze. His fingers sliding around her. Mesmerized at her, still.

He’d know her blindfolded, she realized in the dark. Upside down, inside out. She dug deep for oxygen, needing more, so much more. 

“Turn around,” he asked, hoarse.

She knew what he was asking. Scully turned on her knees, backwards now, facing his feet, kneeling around him. Mulder, flat on the bed, ran his palm up her spine. They did this sometimes when they were trying to last, play around with each other. “ _Ah,_ ” Scully said, holding onto his thighs. Feeling him stroke himself on her clit once and then twice before he sank back inside. 

Scully sank down. Pulled him almost all the way out, then sank down again just to feel him inside her. She couldn’t fuck him like that, moving up and down on his cock, not at this angle, so she found a slow grind. Letting the swollen ridge of him nudge that one spot inside her, again, then again. Stroking her there, until he made soft sounds, until she dropped her head back, saw stars. 

She wanted to come. Suspended there between wanting and not wanting it, not even touching her clit. Somehow more wonderful just to center herself, the way she had in his kitchen, feel it all, nothing else in the room but his thick slide inside her. 

It was wonderful to her. It felt like she was born for it and it couldn’t end, suspended indefinitely, even when her knees ached. He felt new from this angle, new to her and yet somehow still familiar, the recurring theme of the night. He stretched her, right up to the edge of what she could take, even without a quick pace. His hand on her lower back kept her right where she was, guiding her farther forward when his hips could not stop moving. She squeezed around him and heard a dark, grumbling moan. 

“Oh fuck. Don’t move,” Mulder said, gripping her hips, moving her right there against him. Desperately slow, deep inside her, so tight from this angle that she felt out of breath. It took all of her focus to stay steady above him, gripping his calves, then his ankles, reading his body, her own.

“Mulder,” she gasped. “Mulder,” when she had to move. The ache in her knees, her thighs giving out. She squeezed his knee in warning and rolled off, a groan. 

He groaned too, disbelief, a growl and a groan. “No,” he said, fast enough with his reflexes that he caught her by the waist before she slipped out of his reach. Scully gasped, a short burst of a laugh as he tossed her onto her stomach, grabbing hold of her hands to keep her pinned there as he pushed back inside with his cock. 

Oh. _Fuck,_ it was her turn to groan. Gone were the easy, slow strokes. This angle lit her up too, pressing her into the mattress the same time he hauled her hips up to take him even deeper. She grabbed hold of the sheets, bracing against his thrusts, but then he grabbed her hand, wrapped it up with his own and brought it down beneath them. Until she arched and bit back a sharp, happy whimper, each hard stroke now rocking her into her own fingers, entangled with his. Their palms pressing her pelvis. It broke her open. She came before she was ready, not enough warning to prepare herself for it, stifling her cry deep in the pillow when there was nothing she could do. 

Mulder made a sound too, eased up a little but kept dragging inside her. Scully pulled his hand away, her clit desperately sensitive, but would not let his hand go. She kept it pinned down beneath them, the combined sensations overwhelming, narcotic. His hips rolling against hers; her hips answering, rolling back. His mouth on her neck, babbling he loved her, he loved her. _Scully. Fuck. Can you— Dana. Come._

Talking fiercely to her the way he always did when he came. He was arching her hips with every drag of his cock, fucking her past breath, past all sense and reason. She loved it. She loved it. She loved this. She loved him. 

It was the soft sheets on her clit. It was nothing she decided to do. Her hips just kept rolling beneath him, Mulder staying right with her, as deep as she wanted. She was clenching around him with just the right softness and pressure, somehow keeping him hard. The tension inside her had begun to tighten again, like twisting a screw, the strings taut again, resonant. Not done with this yet, needing more, wanting more.

It was incomprehensible to her. The normal boundaries she recognized were nowhere to be found tonight. Mulder’s fingers returned. They moved on her slickly, so wet and so spent that he did it without precision. It didn’t matter. He let that do the work instead of his hips, although she was still stroking against him. It built harder and longer, a dark thing this time, a vortex sucking against her that she tried to fight, which only made it feel better, her body beyond her control.

When she cried out again, gasping into the pillow, it was almost like a sob clenching through her whole body, a shudder, no release. Just a darkening, deepening throb that wracked through her, dark and wonderful, taking all of her strength. 

Mulder was there when she collapsed onto her stomach, rolling over beneath him. There in the dark like a shadow, his hand rubbing her stomach, a deep, speechless kiss when she asked him for the impossible, just a little bit more. _Again. Mulder._ He laid their foreheads together, held her face in his hand as he eased her back down on him. She would pay for it tomorrow, strained and wrung out in a way she would feel to her bones, and yet it was something she needed. Inexplicable and confounding, trying to fathom who she was tonight. 

Mulder brushed back the hair stuck to the side of her face. It was not even a fuck. He just moved inside her until the last vestige of this climax wracked through her and passed, and then the last shudder of whatever strength he had left. Quiet and exhausted and his skin like a fever, he fell down beside her, pulling her into her arms. 

They lay there breathless, reckoning for a moment with what had just happened. What still happened between them. Their tangling bodies, their breath, twining and merging, binding them together in ways that felt profound, overwhelming, undeniable to her. In ways that might take years of her life to comprehend what it meant.

Sleep called to her first. Mulder reached down for the sheet, somehow found it, drew it up to her shoulders to keep out the cold. All of his skin, all of hers, pressed back together beneath it. 

His chest was her pillow. They slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who has been waiting so patiently for chapter 3, thank you, thank you thank you. This took a ton of rewriting and was way more of a struggle than I expected, but it’s finally right.
> 
> (And, uh, how long and crazy this got? It’s gonna pay off in chapter 4. ;)


End file.
